Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions have discovered that a protein called hnRNPM helps protect the integrity of the process cells use to make proteins.
May 30 2024Baylor College of Medicine hnRNPM works by preventing the cell from making mistakes while it is putting together the different components leading to newly produced proteins. In cancer cells, loss of hnRNPM triggers an interferon immune response, suggesting that this protein may hold clinical promise. The findings appeared in Molecular Cell.
When a cell needs to synthesize a protein, it begins by getting the instructions from the corresponding gene in the DNA. Imagine a necklace with beads separated by empty pieces of the string that threads them together as an analogy for the DNA molecule carrying the instructions to make a protein. The beads represent the exons, the segments of a DNA molecule containing the information coding for the protein of interest.
The researchers investigated how cells prevented errors that could occur during the step in which exons are spliced together, which could lead to abnormal mRNA molecules. They looked into splice sites, the segments that mark the location for the splicing of exons. "We found that hnRNPM preferentially binds to introns at regions containing pseudo splice sites," said first author Dr. Rong Zheng, a graduate student in the Cheng lab while she was working on this project. "Their binding prevents or blocks the use of these splice sites when synthesizing RNA molecules, preventing cryptic splicing and therefore maintaining the integrity of the process.
Cancer Cell Cellular Biology DNA Exons Gene Genetics Immune Response Interferon Introns Medicine Molecule Research RNA Splicing
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