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Defective XRN 3‐mediated transcription termination in Arabidopsis affects the expression of protein‐coding genes
Author(s) -
Krzyszton Michal,
ZakrzewskaPlaczek Monika,
Kwasnik Aleksandra,
Dojer Norbert,
Karlowski Wojciech,
Kufel Joanna
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the plant journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.058
H-Index - 269
eISSN - 1365-313X
pISSN - 0960-7412
DOI - 10.1111/tpj.13826
Subject(s) - exoribonuclease , polyadenylation , transcription (linguistics) , gene , biology , rna polymerase ii , arabidopsis , gene knockdown , microbiology and biotechnology , terminator (solar) , gene expression , genetics , termination factor , rna , mutant , rna polymerase , promoter , ionosphere , linguistics , philosophy , physics , astronomy , rnase p
Summary Arabidopsis thaliana contains two nuclear XRN 2/3 5′–3′ exonucleases that are homologs of yeast and human Rat1/Xrn2 proteins involved in the processing and degradation of several classes of nuclear RNA s and in transcription termination of RNA polymerase II . Using strand‐specific short read sequencing we show that knockdown of XRN 3 leads to an altered expression of hundreds of genes and the accumulation of uncapped and polyadenylated read‐through transcripts generated by inefficiently terminated Pol II . Our data support the notion that XRN 3‐mediated changes in the expression of a subset of genes are caused by upstream read‐through transcription and these effects are enhanced by RNA – mRNA chimeras generated in xrn3 plants. In turn, read‐through transcripts that are antisense to downstream genes may trigger production of si RNA . Our results highlight the importance of XRN 3 exoribonuclease in Pol II transcription termination in plants and show that disturbance in this process may significantly alter gene expression.