Abstract
With the advent of new and improved high-throughput sequencing technologies in the last few years, a growing number of novel classes of small RNA, other than miRNAs or siRNA, has emerged, which appear as new actors in gene expression regulation. tRNA-derived small RNAs represent one of these novel members that are, surprisingly, among the most conserved class of small RNAs throughout evolution. They could represent the most primitive small RNA pathways from which the well-known canonical RNA silencing pathways reported in higher eukaryotes evolved. This review aims to make a compilation of the most relevant research literature in this field with the purpose of shedding light on the relation of these primitive tRNA-derived molecules with the gene silencing machinery.
Highlights
The family of non-coding regulatory RNAs has been expanding its members in view of the fact that large-scale studies of the human transcriptome revealed that a significant fraction of the genome is transcribed into these ncRNAs
(tRNA), small nuclear RNAs, and small nucleolar RNAs, which could define a group of RNAs that have a wide range of roles in gene regulation in addition to having the structural and/or functional roles for which they were originally characterized
This review aims to highlight one recently identified class of small ncRNAs (sRNAs) derived from transfer RNA (tRNA), which is frequently segregated into two main sub-classes according to their relative length and biogenesis
Summary
The family of non-coding regulatory RNAs (ncRNAs) has been expanding its members in view of the fact that large-scale studies of the human transcriptome revealed that a significant fraction of the genome is transcribed into these ncRNAs. An additional class of small RNAs that are ~14±22 nt in length was reported and broadly termed tRNA fragments (tRFs) [4], which are processed by either Dicer or RNase Z and found to function to miRNAs [5]. The tsRNA molecules can act as gene regulators at different levels from translational repression to post-transcriptional regulation [4±8] They have been described in a wide range of organisms from prokaryotes to eukaryotes [9±14] which makes them one of the most primitive sRNA class reported. For all these reasons one complete review that contemplates all the data published up to date on tsRNAs and tRFs would be really useful in this field. We will focus on nomenclature matters, organisms studied and possible functions as silencing sRNAs
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