Duaka Nwike
LSAMP Scholar
Major: Biology
Mentors: Heather Hundley, Priyanka Mukherjee, and Ananya Mahapatra
Adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADAR) are a family of proteins that convert adenosine in RNA to inosine by hydrolytic deamination of the amine group in adenosine. Inosine is recognized in the cell as guanine and pairs to cytosine when base pairing. This fact gives this family of proteins the ability to change codons (to code for a different amino acid), create new stop codons and create new splicing sites within RNA. Majority of editing occurs in the 5’and 3’ UTR and introns in pre-mRNA transcripts. ADAR1 and ADAR2 are active members of this family and are expressed in every tissue in the body. ADAR3 is solely expressed in the brain being the only inactive ADAR. 2/3 of RNA transcripts are edited in the cell are edited by ADAR’s post-transcriptionally. ADAR3 have 3 dsRNA binding domains using them to represses binding and editing of mRNA transcripts by ADAR1 and ADAR2.
In Hundley’s lab we are investigating the differential expression of both sense and antisense genes in the presence of ADAR3 in glioblastoma cells. In total 1435 RNA transcripts are bound by ADAR3 in U373 cells. I am investigating the differential expression of ME3 and KRT86 for both sense and antisense RNA transcripts. I analyzed expression of ME3 and KRT86 using qPCR in U373 and U373 + ADAR3 overexpression cells. Experimental data indicates no difference in expression of both sense and antisense for KRT86. A future experiment with different primers for ME3 and KRT86 would need to be performed to confirm the result
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. IN LSAMP is supported by NSF Award Number: HRD-1618408, 2016-2022.
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