Abstract
We report here that fat mass and obesity-associated protein (FTO) has efficient oxidative demethylation activity targeting the abundant N6-methyladenosine (m6A) residues in RNA in vitro. FTO knockdown with siRNA led to increased amounts of m6A in mRNA, whereas overexpression of FTO resulted in decreased amounts of m6A in human cells. We further show the partial colocalization of FTO with nuclear speckles, which supports the notion that m6A in nuclear RNA is a major physiological substrate of FTO.
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Change history
03 July 2012
In the version of this article initially published, one of the institute affiliations of co–first author Xu Zhao and coauthors Ying Yang and Yun-Gui Yang was not included. The affiliations statement has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) (GM071440 to C.H.), an NIH EUREKA award (GM088599 to C.H. and T.P.) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) '100 Talents' Professor Program to Y.-G.Y. Q.D. is supported by the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC). X.Z. and Y.Y. are supported by the Graduate Student Program of the Beijing Institute of Genomics at CAS. T.L. is supported by the CAS Senior Foreign Research Fellow Award (2009S2-1). We thank the CBC and University of Illinois at Chicago Research Resources Center Proteomics and Informatics Services Facility for performing the LC-MS/MS analysis, L.A. Godley for the suggestion and P. Jin for providing the pcDNA3-FTO plasmid. We thank S.F. Reichard for editing the manuscript.
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G.J., Y.F. and C.H. conceived the original idea. G.J., Y.F., X.Z., Y.-G.Y and C.H. designed the experiments with the help of T.P. Biochemistry assays and cellular analysis were performed by G.J., Y.F. and X.Z. with the help of G.Z., C.Y. and Y.Y.; Q.D. carried out the chemical synthesis; T.L. provided advice and the anti-FTO antibody; and G.J., Y.F., Y.-G.Y. and C.H. wrote the paper.
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Jia, G., Fu, Y., Zhao, X. et al. N6-Methyladenosine in nuclear RNA is a major substrate of the obesity-associated FTO. Nat Chem Biol 7, 885–887 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.687
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.687
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