RNA editing level in the mouse is determined by the genomic repeat repertoire

  1. Yossef Neeman1,2,6,
  2. Erez Y. Levanon1,3,6,
  3. Michael F. Jantsch4, and
  4. Eli Eisenberg5
  1. 1.Compugen Ltd., Tel-Aviv 69512, Israel
  2. 2.Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 52900, Israel
  3. 3.Department of Pediatric Hemato-Oncology, Safra Children's Hospital, Sheba Medical Center and Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
  4. 4.Max F. Perutz Laboratories, Department of Chromosome Biology, University of Vienna, A-1030 Vienna, Austria
  5. 5.School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

Abstract

A-to-I RNA editing is the conversion of adenosine to inosine in double-stranded cellular and viral RNAs. Recently, abundant editing of human transcripts affecting thousands of genes has been reported. Most editing sites are confined to the primate-specific Alu repeats. Notably, the editing level in mouse was shown to be much lower. In order to find the reason for this dramatic difference, here we identify editing sites within mouse repeats and analyze the sequence properties required for RNA editing. Our results show that the overall rate of RNA editing is determined by specific properties of different repeat families such as abundance, length, and divergence. We show that the striking difference in editing levels between human and mouse is mostly due to the higher divergence of the different mouse repeats.

Keywords

Footnotes

  • 6. These authors contributed equally to this work.

  • Reprint requests to: Eli Eisenberg, School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel; e-mail: elieis{at}post.tau.ac.il; fax: 972-3-6422979.

  • Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.rnajournal.org/cgi/doi/10.1261/rna.165106.

    • Received May 29, 2006.
    • Accepted July 20, 2006.
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