Abstract
P68 RNA helicase is a prototypical DEAD box RNA helicase. The protein plays a very important role in early organ development and maturation. Consistent with the function of the protein in transcriptional regulation and pre-mRNA splicing, p68 was found to predominately localize in the cell nucleus. However, recent experiments demonstrate a transient cytoplasmic localization of the protein. We report here that p68 shuttles between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. The nucleocytoplasmic shuttling of p68 is mediated by two nuclear localization signal and two nuclear exporting signal sequence elements. Our experiments reveal that p68 shuttles via a classical RanGTPase-dependent pathway.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Drs Joan A Steitz (Yale University School of Medicine), Melissa J Moore (University of Massachusetts medical school) and Hung-Ying Kao (Case Western Reserve University) for providing the vectors for expression of MS2-DEK and human CRM1. We are grateful to Professor Peter Stockley (University of Leeds) for providing antibody against MS2-DEK. We also thank Birgit Neuhaus (Georgia State University) for assistance in confocal imaging. This manuscript is greatly improved by comments from Christie Carter, Michael Kirberger and Heena Dey (Georgia State University). This work is supported in part by research grants from National Institutes of Health (GM063874 and CA118113) and Georgia Cancer Coalition to ZR Liu. X Gao is supported by an MBD fellowship, GSU.
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Wang, H., Gao, X., Huang, Y. et al. P68 RNA helicase is a nucleocytoplasmic shuttling protein. Cell Res 19, 1388–1400 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/cr.2009.113
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/cr.2009.113
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