Abstract
The study of RNA dynamics, specifically RNA transcription and decay rates, has gained increasing attention in recent years because various mechanisms have been discovered that affect mRNA half-life, thereby ultimately controlling protein output. Therefore, there is a need for methods enabling minimally invasive, simple and high-throughput determination of RNA stability that can be applied to determine RNA transcription and decay rates in cells and organisms. We have recently developed a protocol which we named TUC-seq to directly distinguish newly synthesized transcripts from the preexisting pool of transcripts by metabolic labeling of nascent RNAs with 4-thiouridine (4sU) followed by osmium tetroxide-mediated conversion of 4sU to cytidine (C) and direct sequencing. In contrast to other related methods (SLAM-seq, TimeLapse-seq), TUC-seq converts 4sU to a native C instead of an alkylated or otherwise modified nucleoside derivative. TUC-seq can be applied to any cell type that is amenable to 4sU labeling. By employing different labeling strategies (pulse or pulse-chase labeling), it is suitable for a broad field of applications and provides a fast and highly efficient means to determine mRNA transcription and decay rates.
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Acknowledgments
Funding of this research was provided by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) P27024-BBL to A.L. and P27947 to R.M.
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Lusser, A. et al. (2020). Thiouridine-to-Cytidine Conversion Sequencing (TUC-Seq) to Measure mRNA Transcription and Degradation Rates. In: LaCava, J., Vaňáčová, Š. (eds) The Eukaryotic RNA Exosome. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2062. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9822-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9822-7_10
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