Publication Date:
2005-02-12
Description:
Methylation on the base or the ribose is prevalent in eukaryotic ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs) and is thought to be crucial for ribosome biogenesis and function. Artificially introduced 2'-O-methyl groups in small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) can stabilize siRNAs in serum without affecting their activities in RNA interference in mammalian cells. Here, we show that plant microRNAs (miRNAs) have a naturally occurring methyl group on the ribose of the last nucleotide. Whereas methylation of rRNAs depends on guide RNAs, the methyltransferase protein HEN1 is sufficient to methylate miRNA/miRNA* duplexes. Our studies uncover a new and crucial step in plant miRNA biogenesis and have profound implications in the function of miRNAs.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Yu, Bin -- Yang, Zhiyong -- Li, Junjie -- Minakhina, Svetlana -- Yang, Maocheng -- Padgett, Richard W -- Steward, Ruth -- Chen, Xuemei -- GM61146/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2005 Feb 11;307(5711):932-5.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Waksman Institute, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15705854" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Arabidopsis/*metabolism
;
Arabidopsis Proteins/*metabolism
;
Mass Spectrometry
;
Methylation
;
MicroRNAs/chemistry/*metabolism
;
Oligonucleotides, Antisense
;
RNA, Plant/chemistry/*metabolism
;
RNA, Small Interfering/chemistry/metabolism
;
Recombinant Fusion Proteins/genetics/metabolism
;
Ribose/metabolism
;
Substrate Specificity
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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