Developmentally Regulated Novel Non-coding Anti-sense Regulators of mRNA Translation in Trypanosoma b rucei

K Shanmugha Rajan; Tirza Doniger; Smadar Cohen-Chalamish; Praveenkumar Rengaraj; Beathrice Galili; Saurav Aryal; Ron Unger; Christian Tschudi; Shulamit Michaeli

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2020.101780

Developmentally Regulated Novel Non-coding Anti-sense Regulators of mRNA Translation in Trypanosoma b rucei

iScience. 2020 Nov 5;23(12):101780. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2020.101780. eCollection 2020 Dec 18.

Authors

K Shanmugha Rajan¹, Tirza Doniger¹, Smadar Cohen-Chalamish¹, Praveenkumar Rengaraj¹, Beathrice Galili¹, Saurav Aryal¹, Ron Unger¹, Christian Tschudi², Shulamit Michaeli¹

Affiliations

¹ The Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences and Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology Institute, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel.
² Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT 06536, USA.

Abstract

The parasite Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of sleeping sickness and cycles between insect and mammalian hosts. The parasite appears to lack conventional transcriptional regulation of protein coding genes, and mRNAs are processed from polycistronic transcripts by the concerted action of trans-splicing and polyadenylation. Regulation of mRNA function is mediated mainly by RNA binding proteins affecting mRNA stability and translation. In this study, we describe the identification of 62 non-coding (nc) RNAs that are developmentally regulated and/or respond to stress. We characterized two novel anti-sense RNA regulators (TBsRNA-33 and 37) that originate from the rRNA loci, associate with ribosomes and polyribosomes, and interact in vivo with distinct mRNA species to regulate translation. Thus, this study suggests for the first-time anti-sense RNA regulators as an additional layer for controlling gene expression in these parasites.

Keywords: Molecular Biology; Omics.