The acoel worm has recently emerged as a model organism for studying whole-body regeneration and embryonic development. Previous studies suggest that post-transcriptional mechanisms likely play important roles in whole-body regeneration. Here, we establish a resource for studying microRNA-mediated gene regulation, a major aspect of post-transcriptional control in animals.
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May 2024
MicroRNAs are small RNAs that enable parts of the genome to regulate the other parts of the genome by RNA::RNA complementarity. Genes that encode microRNAs function as trans-acting regulators of hundreds of other genes, primarily by inhibiting the production of protein from mRNAs to which the microRNAs can bind by base pairing. MicroRNAs and their Argonaute partner proteins constitute a regulatory complex (the miRISC) that exhibits astonishing regulatory versatility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
March 2024
MicroRNAs (miRNA) associate with Argonaute (AGO) proteins and repress gene expression by base pairing to sequences in the 3' untranslated regions of target genes. De novo coding variants in the human AGO genes and cause neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) with intellectual disability, referred to as Argonaute syndromes. Most of the altered amino acids are conserved between the miRNA-associated AGO in and , suggesting that the human mutations could disrupt conserved functions in miRNA biogenesis or activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHost-pathogen interactions are complex by nature, and the host developmental stage increases this complexity. By utilizing Caenorhabditis elegans larvae as the host and the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa as the pathogen, we investigated how a developing organism copes with pathogenic stress. By screening 36 P.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroRNAs (miRNA) are endogenous non-coding RNAs important for post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. miRNAs associate with Argonaute proteins to bind to the 3' UTR of target genes and confer target repression. Recently, multiple coding variants in the human Argonaute gene ( ) have been reported to cause a neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) with intellectual disability (ID).
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