发布: 2018年03月20日第8卷第6期 DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2775 浏览次数: 27667
评审: Gal HaimovichOmar AkilWilliam C. W. Chen
Abstract
Gene expression in eukaryotic cells is tightly regulated at the transcriptional and posttranscriptional levels. Posttranscriptional processes, including pre-mRNA splicing, mRNA export, mRNA turnover, and mRNA translation, are controlled by RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) and noncoding (nc)RNAs. The vast family of ncRNAs comprises diverse regulatory RNAs, such as microRNAs and long noncoding (lnc)RNAs, but also the poorly explored class of circular (circ)RNAs. Although first discovered more than three decades ago by electron microscopy, only the advent of high-throughput RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) and the development of innovative bioinformatic pipelines have begun to allow the systematic identification of circRNAs (Szabo and Salzman, 2016; Panda et al., 2017b; Panda et al., 2017c). However, the validation of true circRNAs identified by RNA sequencing requires other molecular biology techniques including reverse transcription (RT) followed by conventional or quantitative (q) polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and Northern blot analysis (Jeck and Sharpless, 2014). RT-qPCR analysis of circular RNAs using divergent primers has been widely used for the detection, validation, and sometimes quantification of circRNAs (Abdelmohsen et al., 2015 and 2017; Panda et al., 2017b). As detailed here, divergent primers designed to span the circRNA backsplice junction sequence can specifically amplify the circRNAs and not the counterpart linear RNA. In sum, RT-PCR analysis using divergent primers allows direct detection and quantification of circRNAs.
Keywords: Circular RNA (环状RNA)Background
CircRNAs are covalently closed, single-stranded RNAs lacking 5’ or 3’ ends. Although their genesis is poorly understood, they can arise from pre-mRNAs by a process called backsplicing (Panda et al., 2017d; Jeck et al., 2013). CircRNAs have been reported to be abundant, ubiquitously expressed, and conserved across species (Jeck et al., 2013). A number of studies have established that circRNAs can regulate gene expression by acting as competitors of pre-mRNA splicing, as decoys for microRNAs, as sponges for RBPs, and possibly also as substrates for translation (Panda et al., 2017d). In recent years, more than one hundred thousand circRNAs have been reported bioinformatically from high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) (Glazar et al., 2014). Unfortunately, there is little overlap among different bioinformatic pipelines and there is no ‘gold standard’ method to validate the accuracy of circRNAs identified by different bioinformatic tools (Szabo and Salzman, 2016). However, RT-PCR has been widely used for validation of circRNAs identified by RNA-seq. This protocol describes the design of divergent primers which face away from each other on the linear RNA, so that they can only amplify the circRNAs, and not the linear RNAs with the same sequence. The PCR amplicon for the detection of circRNAs using divergent primers spans the backsplice junction of circRNAs. This method has been successfully used in several studies for the detection and quantification of circRNAs.
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文章信息
版权信息
© 2018 The Authors; exclusive licensee Bio-protocol LLC.
如何引用
Panda, A. C. and Gorospe, M. (2018). Detection and Analysis of Circular RNAs by RT-PCR. Bio-protocol 8(6): e2775. DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2775.
分类
癌症生物学 > 通用技术 > 分子生物学技术
分子生物学 > RNA > RNA 检测
分子生物学 > RNA > qRT-PCR
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