Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2015 Nov;58(11):1057-66.
doi: 10.1007/s11427-015-4954-9. Epub 2015 Oct 27.

Uridylation and adenylation of RNAs

JianBo Song  1   2 , Jun Song  3 , BeiXin Mo  4 , XueMei Chen  5   6   7
Affiliations
Review

Uridylation and adenylation of RNAs

JianBo Song et al. Sci China Life Sci. 2015 Nov.

Abstract

The posttranscriptional addition of nontemplated nucleotides to the 3' ends of RNA molecules can have a significant impact on their stability and biological function. It has been recently discovered that nontemplated addition of uridine or adenosine to the 3' ends of RNAs occurs in different organisms ranging from algae to humans, and on different kinds of RNAs, such as histone mRNAs, mRNA fragments, U6 snRNA, mature small RNAs and their precursors etc. These modifications may lead to different outcomes, such as increasing RNA decay, promoting or inhibiting RNA processing, or changing RNA activity. Growing pieces of evidence have revealed that such modifications can be RNA sequence-specific and subjected to temporal or spatial regulation in development. RNA tailing and its outcomes have been associated with human diseases such as cancer. Here, we review recent developments in RNA uridylation and adenylation and discuss the future prospects in this research area.

Keywords: U6 snRNA; Uridylation; adenylation; histone mRNA; miRNA; pre-miRNA; rRNA.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A summary of the substrates and outcomes of RNA uridylation and adenylation in humans.
Figure 2
Figure 2
A summary of the substrates and outcomes of RNA uridylation in Arabidopsis.
Figure 3
Figure 3
A phylogenetic tree of the nucleotidyl transferase protein (NTP) family from Arabidopsis thaliana (At), Oryza sativa (Os), Amborella trichopoda (Am), Medicago truncatula (Mt), Populus trichocarpa (Pt), Selaginella moellendorffii (Sm), Physcomitrella patens (Pp) and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (Cr). The potential NTPs from various organisms were retrieved by searches using the PFam nucleotidyl transferase domain (PF01909) [91] as the query against the protein databases for these organisms at Phytozome (http://phytozome.jgi.doe.gov). The searches were performed with the HMMER3 pipeline [92,93]. The full-length NTP protein sequences were aligned by CLUSTAL X 2.0 [94], and the alignments were used to generate an unrooted phylogenetic tree with MEGA 5.1 [95], using the p-distance method and a bootstrap value of 1,000. Evolutionary distance is indicated by the scale bar inside the figure. The NTPs used in the analysis are listed in Supplemental Table S1.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Manley JL. Messenger RNA polyadenylylation: a universal modification. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1995;92:1800–1801. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Sprinzl M, Cramer F. The-CCA end of tRNA and its role in protein biosynthesis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1979;22:1–69. - PubMed
    1. Scott DD, Norbury CJ. RNA decay via 3′ uridylation. Biochim Biophys Acta. 2013;1829:654–665. - PubMed
    1. Wickens M, Kwak JE. A tail tale for U. Science. 2008;319:1344–1345. - PubMed
    1. Wang Z-F, Whitfield ML, Ingledue TCr, Dominski Z, Marzluff WF. The protein that binds the 3′ end of histone mRNA: a novel RNA-binding protein required for histone pre-mRNA processing. Genes Dev. 1996;10:3028–3040. - PubMed

Publication types