View the Current Issue

Article

  • The EMBO Journal (2008) 27, 1585 - 1595
  • doi:10.1038/emboj.2008.88

Published online: 1 May 2008

Inter-kingdom conservation of mechanism of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay

Zoltán Kerényi1,a, Zsuzsanna Mérai1,a, László Hiripi1, Anna Benkovics1, Péter Gyula2, Christophe Lacomme3,4, Endre Barta1, Ferenc Nagy2 and Dániel Silhavy1

  1. Agricultural Biotechnology Center, Gödöllo 2acute, Hungary
  2. Institute of Plant Biology, Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Szeged, Hungary
  3. SCRI, Invergowrie, Dundee, UK
  4. Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Correspondence to:

Dániel Silhavy, RNA biology, Agricultural Biotechnology Center, Szent-Györgyi Albert 4, Gödöllo 2acute 2100, Hungary. Tel.: +36 28 526 194; Fax: +36 28 526 145; E-mail: silhavy@abc.hu

aThese authors contributed equally to this work

Received 24 August 2007; Accepted 4 April 2008

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is a quality control system that degrades mRNAs containing premature termination codons. Although NMD is well characterized in yeast and mammals, plant NMD is poorly understood. We have undertaken the functional dissection of NMD pathways in plants. Using an approach that allows rapid identification of plant NMD trans factors, we demonstrated that two plant NMD pathways coexist, one eliminates mRNAs with long 3'UTRs, whereas a distinct pathway degrades mRNAs harbouring 3'UTR-located introns. We showed that UPF1, UPF2 and SMG-7 are involved in both plant NMD pathways, whereas Mago and Y14 are required only for intron-based NMD. The molecular mechanism of long 3'UTR-based plant NMD resembled yeast NMD, whereas the intron-based NMD was similar to mammalian NMD, suggesting that both pathways are evolutionarily conserved. Interestingly, the SMG-7 NMD component is targeted by NMD, suggesting that plant NMD is autoregulated. We propose that a complex, autoregulated NMD mechanism operated in stem eukaryotes, and that despite aspect of the mechanism being simplified in different lineages, feedback regulation was retained in all kingdoms.

  • Keywords:

    • EJC,
    • NMD,
    • SMG-7,
    • UPF,
    • VIGS