TY  - GEN
T1  - C. elegans mpk-1b long first intron enhances MPK-1B protein expression
AU  - Robinson-Thiewes, Sarah
AU  - Kimble, Judith
DO  - 10.17912/micropub.biology.000350
UR  - http://beta.micropublication.org/journals/biology/micropub-biology-000350/
AB  - Most eukaryotic genes make nascent transcripts that include both introns and exons. Introns are spliced out, usually co-transcriptionally, to generate mature mRNA (Herzel et al. 2017). Once considered a byproduct of transcription, introns are now known to affect virtually all aspects of mRNA metabolism, from transcriptional initiation to translation (Swinburne and Silver 2008; Chorev and Carmel 2012; Rose 2019). Genes can have multiple introns of variable size, but the first intron is often the longest (Smith 1988; Kriventseva and Gelfand 1999; Bradnam and Korf 2008). We wondered if the long first intron of a critical developmental regulator might affect its expression during development. To address this question, we analyzed expression of the C. elegans mpk-1b RNA, which encodes a nematode ERK/MAPK ortholog and has a long first intron (Figure 1A). Because mpk-1b is a germline-specific RNA (Lee et al. 2007; Robinson-Thiewes et al. 2020a), we assayed its expression along the developmental axis of the distal gonad (Figure 1B). Here, germ cells move through three regions as they progress from germline stem cells (GSCs) to differentiation: GSCs and GSC daughters primed for differentiation reside in the Progenitor Zone (PZ); germ cells enter meiotic prophase in the Transition Zone (TZ); and continue through meiotic prophase in the Early Pachytene (EP) region (Figure 1B)(Hubbard and Schedl 2019). Previously, we reported that a set of three ~1 kb deletions at distinct sites within the mpk-1b long intron did not affect its transcription or mRNA abundance (Robinson-Thiewes et al. 2020b). Here, we report effects of these deletions on production of the MPK-1B protein.
PY  - 2021
JO  - microPublication Biology
ER  -