Molecular Biology

[Abstract] Mutations in RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) such as TDP43 are associated with transcriptome-wide splicing defects and cause severe neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The impact of RBP mutations on splicing function is routinely studied using PCR-based bulk measurements. ...

[Abstract] The construction of Hybrid minigenes provides a robust and simple strategy to study the effects of disease-causing mutations on mRNA splicing when biological material from patient cells is not available. Hybrid minigenes can be used as splicing reporter plasmids allow RNA expression and heterologous splicing reactions between synthetic splicing ...

[Abstract] Disease-associated mutations influencing mRNA splicing are referred to as splice mutations. The majority of splice mutations are found on exon-intron boundaries defining canonical donor and acceptor splice sites. However, mutations in the coding region (exonic mutations) can also affect mRNA splicing. Exact knowledge of the disease mechanism of ...

[Abstract] CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing relies on a guide RNA (gRNA) molecule to generate sequence-specific DNA cleavage, which is a prerequisite for gene editing. Here we establish a method that enables production of gRNAs from any promoters, in any organisms, and in vitro (Gao and Zhao, 2014). This method also makes it feasible to conduct ...

[Abstract] Using a Reverse Transcriptase-PCR approach spliced transcripts can be converted to cDNA, amplified and cloned into an expression plasmid. Sequencing of the obtained cDNA allows identification of the splicing events that generated the detected RNA (Grewe et al., 2012).