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Small RNAs

Making a big impression on the proteome

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 9, pages 668–669 (2008)Cite this article

Both studies introduced miRNAs into cultured human cells and measured their effect on protein levels using a method called SILAC (stable isotope labelling with amino acids in cell culture). This method labels proteins with heavy-isotope forms of amino acids during translation. Mass spectrometry is then used to detect the labelled proteins, and to quantify changes in their abundance. To ensure that results are not skewed by differences in protein-degradation rates, Selbach et al. developed a variant of the SILAC approach they call pulsed SILAC (pSILAC) to directly measure changes in de novo protein production.

The effect of various miRNAs was investigated by Baek et al. and by Selbach et al., and both groups observed that individual miRNAs caused the repression of hundreds of proteins. They also identified a specific feature of mRNAs as having a major causative role in protein downregulation by miRNAs — a 7–8-nucleotide sequence in the 3′ untranslated region that is complementary to the seed region of the corresponding miRNA. This seed-complementary sequence was the only significantly enriched sequence across the repressed proteins, although some proteins without this sequence in their transcripts were also repressed.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Baek et al. The impact of microRNAs on protein output. Nature 30 July 2008 (doi: 10.1038/nature07242)

  2. Selbach et al. Widespread changes in protein synthesis induced by microRNAs. Nature 30 July 2008 (doi: 10.1038/nature07228)

FURTHER READING

  1. Filipowicz, W., Bhattacharyya, S. N. & Sonenburg, N. Mechanisms of post-transcriptional regulation by microRNAs: are the answers in sight? Nature Rev. Genet. 9, 102–114 (2008)

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  1. Copy Editor, Nature Reviews Genetics,

    Elizabeth Neame

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  1. Elizabeth Neame
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Neame, E. Making a big impression on the proteome. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 9, 668–669 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm2472

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