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Fail‐safe Termination Elements: A Common Feature of the Eukaryotic Genome?
Author(s) -
Nazar Ross N.,
Nabavi Sadegh
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.23.1_supplement.495.11
Subject(s) - polyadenylation , genome , transposable element , biology , computational biology , rnase p , genetics , transcription (linguistics) , gene , rna , linguistics , philosophy
A recent scan of the human genome identified approximately 11 million hairpins. Some have been linked to known sequences such as viruses, transposable elements and, more recently, regulating or microRNAs but the significance, if any, of most sequences which can be predicted to form hairpins remains unknown. Here we show that hairpins which are cleaved by RNase III‐like nucleases can induce termination, even with normally polyadenylated transcripts and that a cleaved hairpin, downstream of a normal termination signal can induce fail‐safe termination. The results raise the possibility that similar fail‐safe termination elements are widely distributed in the eukaryotic genome to prevent read‐through transcription from disrupting downstream promoter elements. Supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.