Figure 1

tRH abundance in HBV- and HCV-infected liver.

(a) (left) Read length distribution of 14–40 nt RNAs in non-malignant liver from uninfected, HBV-, or HCV-infected subjects (n = 4 each) and FT3-7 cells (n = 3 replicates). (right) Proportion of reads mapping to miRNA versus tRNA loci. Boxes represent median ± 1.5 * interquartile range. (b) tRNA coverage plot from the average of the 20 non-cancer samples. Dot size represents percent of reads mapping at each base position within each tRNA (top 20 by average abundance). The anticodon is red, with 5′ bases green and 3′ bases blue. Gray: bases of RNAs that are non-tRHs. See Supplemental Figure 1. (c) Proportion of mapped reads aligning to miR-122 versus the five most abundant tRNA-derived RNAs. (d) (left) Expression levels (RT-qPCR) of miR-122, 5′ tRH^Gly (“Gly[C/G]CC”) and 5′ tRH^Val (“Val[A/C]AC”) in uninfected (n = 5–6), HBV-infected (n = 6–9) and HCV-infected (n = 14) human liver. Numbers of samples differ due to limited RNA. (right) Similar results from uninfected (n = 5), HBV-infected (n = 9) and HCV-infected C (n = 5) chimpanzees. RNU48 was used as a normalizer. *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.005 by Mann-Whitney U-test. (e) ClustalW⁴³ multiple sequence alignment of representative tRNA^Gly and tRNA^Val genes from which 5′ tRH^Gly and 5′ tRH^Val could originate (see Supplemental Figure 3). tRNAs regions are highlighted according to the color scheme in panel (b). The box identifies a unique conserved sequence motif described in the text. “Mapped reads” represents all reads aligning to miRNAs or tRNAs (see Methods).