Adenosine deaminases that act on RNA induce reproducible changes in abundance and sequence of embryonic miRNAs

We used transgenic mouse embryos that are deficient in the two enzymatically active RNA editing enzymes ADAR1 and ADAR2 to compare relative frequencies but also sequence composition of mature miRNAs in these genetically modified backgrounds to wild-type mice by Illumina next gen sequencing. Deficiency of ADAR2 leads to a reproducible change in abundance of specific miRNAs and their predicted targets. Changes in miRNA abundance seem unrelated to editing events. Additional deletion of ADAR1 has surprisingly little impact on the mature miRNA repertoire, indicating that miRNA expression is primarily dependent on ADAR2. A to G transitions reflecting A to I editing events can be detected at few sites and at low frequency during the early embryonic stage investigated. Again, most editing events are ADAR2 dependent with only few editing sites being specifically edited by ADAR1. Besides known editing events in miRNAs a few novel, previously unknown editing events were identified. Some editing events are located to the seed region of miRNAs opening the possibility that editing leads to their retargeting. Overall design: GSM852140-8: sequencing of mature miRNAs of wt, ADAR2-/- and ADAR1-/-/ADAR2-/- female mouse embryos at E11.5 GSM863778-81: Gene expression was measured in wiltype, ADAR2-/- and ADAR1-/-/ADAR2-/- E11.5 whole female mouse embryos using Agilent Whole Mouse Genome Oligo Microarrays 8x60K.

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Vesely C, Tauber S, Sedlazeck FJ, von Haeseler A, Jantsch MF