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Eukaryotic antisense ahead of its time

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 17, page 204 (2016)Cite this article

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tcRNA102 ... is probably the first antisense regulatory RNA identified in a higher eukaryote

I was an undergraduate student in the laboratory of Stu Heywood at the University of Connecticut–Storrs in the mid-1970s. His laboratory studied embryonic chick muscles. Beginning the summer between my sophomore and junior years, as a wide-eyed and impressionable budding scientist (who, for reasons unknown at the time, looked forward to every precipitation that required mouth-pipetting 25 ml of ethanol), I was truly in awe of what was already known about the steps of eukaryotic protein synthesis and of the types of experiments that could uncover new effectors of mRNA translation. Stu called one such effector 'translational control RNA' (tcRNA) in a paper (Bester et al.) that was published after I left for the University of Wisconsin–Madison to start graduate school. It turns out that what Stu ended up calling tcRNA102, as it is 102 nucleotides, is probably the first antisense regulatory RNA identified in a higher eukaryote. tcRNA102 had imperfect complementarity to the 5′ untranslated region (UTR) of the myosin heavy chain (MHC) mRNA, was a constituent of isolated MHC mRNP particles, and stoichiometrically inhibited the translation of mRNAs with which it associated.

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References

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  1. Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, School of Medicine and Dentistry, and Center for RNA Biology, University of Rochester, Rochester, 14642, New York, USA

    Lynne E. Maquat

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  1. Lynne E. Maquat
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Correspondence to Lynne E. Maquat.

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Maquat, L. Eukaryotic antisense ahead of its time. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 17, 204 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2016.1

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