MIWI and piRNA-mediated cleavage of messenger RNAs in mouse testes  

作　　者：Peng Zhang Jun-Yan Kang Lan-Tao GOU Jiajia Wang Yuanchao Xue Geir Skogerboe Peng Dai Da-Wei Huang Runsheng Chen Xiang-Dong Fu Mo-Fang Liu Shunmin He 

机构地区：[1]Key Laboratory of the Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China [2]Center for RNA Research, State Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, [3]Shanghai Key Laboratory of Molecular Andrology, Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China [4]Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Noncoding RNA, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China [5]State Key Laboratory of Virology, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430072, China [6]Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0651, USA

出　　处：《Cell Research》2015年第2期193-207,共15页细胞研究（英文版）

基　　金：Acknowledgments We are grateful to Xiaole Shirley Liu and Jianhua Yang for thoughtful discussions and valuable comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China （2011 CB504605 and 2014AA021103）, the National Natural Science Foundation of China （31090253, 31210103912, 31325008 and 91419307）, the Chinese Academy of Sciences （CAS; KJZD-EW-L01-2）, the Key Laboratory of the Zoological Systematics and Evolution of the Chinese Academy of Sciences （O529YX5105）, and the National Science Fund for Fostering Talents in Basic Research （Special subjects in animal taxonomy, NSFC-J1210002）. This work was also supported by NIH grants （GM052872 and HG004659）. The computing resource was supported by HPC Platform, Scientific Information Center, Institute of Zoology, CAS.

摘　　要：The piRNA machinery is known for its role in mediating epigenetic silencing of transposons. Recent studies suggest that this function also involves piRNA-guided cleavage of transposon-derived transcripts. As many piRNAs also appear to have the capacity to target diverse mRNAs, this raises the intriguing possibility that piRNAs may act extensively as siRNAs to degrade specific mRNAs. To directly test this hypothesis, we compared mouse PIWI （MI- WI）-associated piRNAs with experimentally identified cleaved mRNA fragments from mouse testes, and observed cleavage sites that predominantly occur at position 10 from the 5＇ end of putative targeting piRNAs. We also noted strong biases for U and A residues at nucleotide positions 1 and 10, respectively, in both piRNAs and mRNA frag- ments, features that resemble the pattern of piRNA amplification by the ＇ping-pong＇ cycle. Through mapping of MIWI-RNA interactions by CLIP-seq and gene expression profiling, we found that many potential piRNA-targeted mRNAs directly interact with MIWI and show elevated expression levels in the testes of Miwi catalytic mutant mice. Reporter-based assays further revealed the importance of base pairing between piRNAs and mRNA targets and the requirement for both the slicer activity and piRNA-loading ability of MIWI in piRNA-mediated target repression. Importantly, we demonstrated that proper turnover of certain key piRNA targets is essential for sperm formation. Together, these findings reveal the siRNA-like function of the piRNA machinery in mouse testes and its central requirement for male germ cell development and maturation.

关 键 词：PIRNA MIWI SPERM 

分 类 号：Q954.434[生物学—动物学] S572[农业科学—烟草工业]