N(6)-methyladenosine-dependent RNA structural switches regulate RNA-protein interactions.

Abstract

RNA-binding proteins control many aspects of cellular biology through binding single-stranded RNA binding motifs (RBM)1-3. However, RBMs can be buried within their local RNA structures4-7, thus inhibiting RNA-protein interactions. N6-methyladenosine (m6A), the most abundant and dynamic internal modification in eukaryotic messenger RNA8-19, can be selectively recognized by the YTHDF2 protein to affect the stability of cytoplasmic mRNAs15, but how m6A achieves wide-ranging physiological significance needs further exploration. Here we show that m6A controls the RNA-structure-dependent accessibility of RBMs to affect RNA-protein interactions for biological regulation; we term this mechanism “m6A-switch”. We found that m6A alters the local structure in mRNA and long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) to facilitate binding of heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein C (hnRNP C), an abundant nuclear RNA-binding protein responsible for pre-mRNA processing20-24. Combining PAR-CLIP and m6A/MeRIP approaches enabled us to identify 39,060 m6A-switches among hnRNP C binding sites; and global m6A reduction decreased hnRNP C binding at 2,798 high confidence m6A-switches. We determined that these m6A-switch-regulated hnRNP C binding activities affect the abundance as well as alternative splicing of target mRNAs, demonstrating the regulatory role of m6A-switches on gene expression and RNA maturation. Our results illustrate how RNA-binding proteins gain regulated access to their RBMs through m6A-dependent RNA structural remodeling, and provide a new direction for investigating RNA-modification-coded cellular biology.