Structural and functional analysis of viral siRNAs

Szittya, Gyorgy, Moxon, Simon ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4644-1816, Pantaleo, Vitantonio, Toth, Gabor, Rusholme Pilcher, Rachel L., Moulton, Vincent ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9371-6435, Burgyan, Jozsef and Dalmay, Tamas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1492-5429 (2010) Structural and functional analysis of viral siRNAs. PLoS Pathogens, 6 (4). ISSN 1553-7374

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Abstract

A large amount of short interfering RNA (vsiRNA) is generated from plant viruses during infection, but the function, structure and biogenesis of these is not understood. We profiled vsiRNAs using two different high-throughput sequencing platforms and also developed a hybridisation based array approach. The profiles obtained through the Solexa platform and by hybridisation were very similar to each other but different from the 454 profile. Both deep sequencing techniques revealed a strong bias in vsiRNAs for the positive strand of the virus and identified regions on the viral genome that produced vsiRNA in much higher abundance than other regions. The hybridisation approach also showed that the position of highly abundant vsiRNAs was the same in different plant species and in the absence of RDR6. We used the Terminator 5′-Phosphate-Dependent Exonuclease to study the 5′ end of vsiRNAs and showed that a perfect control duplex was not digested by the enzyme without denaturation and that the efficiency of the Terminator was strongly affected by the concentration of the substrate. We found that most vsiRNAs have 5′ monophosphates, which was also confirmed by profiling short RNA libraries following either direct ligation of adapters to the 5′ end of short RNAs or after replacing any potential 5′ ends with monophosphates. The Terminator experiments also showed that vsiRNAs were not perfect duplexes. Using a sensor construct we also found that regions from the viral genome that were complementary to non-abundant vsiRNAs were targeted in planta just as efficiently as regions recognised by abundant vsiRNAs. Different high-throughput sequencing techniques have different reproducible sequence bias and generate different profiles of short RNAs. The Terminator exonuclease does not process double stranded RNA, and because short RNAs can quickly re-anneal at high concentration, this assay can be misleading if the substrate is not denatured and not analysed in a dilution series. The sequence profiles and Terminator digests suggest that CymRSV siRNAs are produced from the structured positive strand rather than from perfect double stranded RNA or by RNA dependent RNA polymerase.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: © 2010 Szittya et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology > Computational biology of RNA (former - to 2018)
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology > Phylogenetics (former - to 2018)
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Plant Sciences
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Norwich Epidemiology Centre
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Norwich Epidemiology Centre
Depositing User: Users 2731 not found.
Date Deposited: 08 Mar 2011 10:46
Last Modified: 15 Jun 2023 13:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/25735
DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1000838

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