New Insights into NMD

The Mühlemann lab of the University of Bern published a high-confidence set of endogenous transcripts that are targeted by nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) in HeLa cells. These NMD targets were identified by conducting a meta-analysis of transcript level changes under knockdown and rescue conditions of three NMD factors (UPF1, SMG6 and SMG7) followed by high throughput transcriptome sequencing at the NGS technology platform in Bern. This study revealed that the SMG6 and SMG7 degradation pathways are highly redundant regarding the RNAs they target. Moreover, it identified a substantial fraction of transcripts annotated as “non-coding” in the database as NMD substrates, indicating that in fact they are translated. The authors also confirmed that introns located more than 50 nucleotides downstream of the stop codon, upstream ORFs and long 3’ UTRs are features enriched among NMD targets.

Read the Publication in the RNA Journal (Open Access)

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