"Pre-mRNA splicing function of the ubiquitin-like protein Hub1/UBL-5 in" by Kiran Kumar Kolathur, Pallavi Sharma et al.
 

Pre-mRNA splicing function of the ubiquitin-like protein Hub1/UBL-5 in Caenorhabditis elegans

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Background: The ubiquitin-like protein Hub1/UBL-5 associates with proteins non-covalently. Hub1 promotes alternative splicing and splicing of precursor mRNAs with weak introns in yeast and mammalian cells; however, its splicing function has remained elusive in multicellular organisms. Here we demonstrate Hub1/UBL-5’s splicing function in the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. It binds to the HIND-containing splicing factors Snu66/SART-1 and PRP-38 and associates with other spliceosomal proteins. C. elegans hub1/ubl-5 mutants die at the larval L3 stage and show splicing defects for selected targets, similar to the mutants in yeast and mammalian cells. UBL-5 complemented growth and splicing defects in Schizosaccharomyces pombe hub1 mutants, confirming its functional conservation. Thus, UBL-5 is important for C. elegans development and plays a conserved pre-mRNA splicing function.

Methods: protein purification, protein-protein interaction, S. pombe complementation, and splicing assays, C. elegans strain maintenance, and rescue experiments

Conclusion: In this study, we have investigated the potential role of C. elegans UBL-5 in pre-mRNA splicing. The ubl-5 mutant animals did not grow beyond the Larval 3 stage, indicating a crucial role of UBL-5 in the animal’s development. By making a splicing-sensitive microarray of a subset of genes and hybridizing total RNA isolated from L3 stage mutant worms, we found an accumulation of intron-containing transcripts, outron-containing transcripts, and intercistronic regions in ubl-5 mutant worms. The data presented here suggest that UBL-5 plays a role in cis- and trans-RNA splicing

Reference: Kolathur, K.K., Sharma, P., Kadam, N.Y., Shahi, N., Nishitha, A., Babu, K. and Mishra, S.K. (2023), The ubiquitin-like protein Hub1/UBL-5 functions in pre-mRNA splicing in Caenorhabditis elegans. FEBS Lett, 597: 448-457. https://doi.org/10.1002/1873-3468.14555

Publication Date

2023

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