UPF1-depleted HeLa cells - effect on physiological targets

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is a molecular pathway of mRNA surveillance that ensures rapid degradation of mRNAs containing premature translation termination codons (PTCs) in eukaryotes. Originally, NMD was thought of as a quality control pathway that targets non-functional mRNAs arising from mutations and splicing errors. More recently, NMD has been shown to also regulate normal gene expression and NMD thus emerged as one of the key post-transcriptional mechanisms of gene regulation. We have now systematically analyzed the molecular mechanism of variable NMD efficiency and used different HeLa cell strains as a model system. The results of this analysis show that NMD efficiency can be remarkably variable and represents a stable characteristic of these strains. Low NMD efficiency is shown to be functionally related to the reduced abundance of the exon junction component RNPS1 in one of the HeLa strain analyzed. Furthermore, restoration of functional RNPS1 expression, but not of NMD-inactive mutant proteins, also restores efficient NMD in the RNPS1 deficient cell line. We conclude that cellular concentrations of RNPS1 modify NMD efficiency and propose that the cell type specific co-factor availability represents a novel principle that controls NMD.

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Viegas MH, Gehring NH, Breit S, Hentze MW, Kulozik AE