Human brain shows recurrent non-canonical microRNA editing events enriched for seed sequence with possible functional consequence

Paul, D; Ansari, AH; Lal, M; Mukhopadhyay, A

Abstract

RNA editing is a post-transcriptional modification, which can provide tissue-specific functions not encoded in DNA. Adenosine-to-inosine is the predominant editing event and, along with cytosine-to-uracil changes, constitutes canonical editing. The rest is non-canonical editing. In this study, we have analysed non-canonical editing of microRNAs in the human brain. We have performed massively parallel small RNA sequencing of frontal cortex (FC) and corpus callosum (CC) pairs from nine normal individuals (post-mortem). We found 113 and 90 unique non-canonical editing events in FC and CC samples, respectively. More than 70% of events were in the miRNA seed sequence—implicating an altered set of target mRNAs and possibly resulting in a functional consequence. Up to 15% of these events were recurring and found in at least three samples, also supporting the biological relevance of such variations. Two specific sequence variations, C-to-A and G-to-U, accounted for over 80% of non-canonical miRNA editing events—and revealed preferred sequence motifs. Our study is one of the first reporting non-canonical editing in miRNAs in the human brain. Our results implicate miRNA non-canonical editing as one of the contributing factors towards transcriptomic diversity in the human brain.

Citation

Paul, D., Ansari, A., Lal, M., & Mukhopadhyay, A. (2020). Human brain shows recurrent non-canonical microRNA editing events enriched for seed sequence with possible functional consequence. Non-Coding RNA, 6(2), e21. https://doi.org/10.3390/ncrna6020021

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 27, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jun 2, 2020
• Publication Date: Jun 2, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jun 4, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 4, 2020
• Journal: Non-Coding RNA
• Publisher: MDPI
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 2
• Pages: e21
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ncrna6020021
• Keywords: microRNA, RNA editing, human brain
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/ncrna6020021
• Related Public URLs: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ncrna
• Additional Information: Additional Information : ** From MDPI via Jisc Publications Router ** Licence for this article: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ **Journal IDs: eissn 2311-553X **History: published 02-06-2020; accepted 27-05-2020