Alternative splicing is a nearly ubiquitous versatile process that controls gene expression and creates numerous protein isoforms with different functions from a single gene. The significance of alternative splicing has been confirmed by the increasing number of human diseases that are caused by misregulation of splicing events. Very few compounds, however, have been reported to act as inhibitors of alternative splicing, and their potential clinical use needs to be evaluated. Here, we report that CX-4945, a previously well-characterized inhibitor of casein kinase 2 (CK2) and a molecule currently in clinical trials (Phase II) for cancer treatment, regulates splicing in mammalian cells in a CK2-independent manner. Transcriptome-wide analysis using exon array also showed a widespread alteration in alternative splicing of numerous genes. We found that CX-4945 potently inhibits the Cdc2-like kinases (Clks) in vitro and in turn, leads to suppression of the phosphorylation of serine/arginine-rich (SR) proteins in mammalian cells. Surprisingly, the overall efficacy of CX-4945 on Clks (IC50 = 3-90 nM) was stronger than that of TG-003, the strongest inhibitor reported to date. Of the Clks, Clk2 was most strongly inhibited by CX-4945 in an ATP-competitive manner. Our research revealed an unexpected activity of the drug candidate CX-4945 as a potent splicing modulator and also suggested a potential application for therapy of diseases caused by abnormal splicing.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3990583 | PMC |
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094978 | PLOS |
Front Mol Neurosci
December 2024
Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Post-transcriptional mechanisms, such as alternative splicing and polyadenylation, are recognized as critical regulatory processes that increase transcriptomic and proteomic diversity. The advent of next-generation sequencing and whole-genome analyses has revealed that numerous transcription and epigenetic regulators, including transcription factors and histone-modifying enzymes, undergo alternative splicing, most notably in the nervous system. Given the complexity of regulatory processes in the brain, it is conceivable that many of these splice variants control different aspects of neuronal development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe 1.7 kb DRAIC long noncoding RNA inhibits tumor growth, inhibits cancer cell invasion, migration, colony formation and interacts with IKK (IκB kinase) subunits, inhibiting the phosphorylation and degradation of the NF-κB inhibitor, IκB, to suppress the activation of NF-κB. Whether these activities are all linked is unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The maturation of RNA is mediated by the coordinated actions of RNA-binding proteins through post-transcriptional pre-mRNA processing. This process is a central regulatory mechanism for gene expression and plays a crucial role in the development of complex biological systems. MYC directly upregulates transcription of genes encoding the core components of pre-mRNA splicing machinery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Pre-mRNA splicing, carried out in the nucleus by a large ribonucleoprotein machine known as the spliceosome, is functionally and physically coupled to the mRNA surveillance pathway in the cytoplasm called nonsense mediated mRNA decay (NMD). The NMD pathway monitors for premature translation termination signals, which can result from alternative splicing, by relying on the exon junction complex (EJC) deposited on exon-exon junctions by the spliceosome. Recently, multiple genetic screens in human cell lines have identified numerous spliceosome components as putative NMD factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTypical high-throughput single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) analyses are primarily conducted by (pseudo)alignment, through the lens of annotated gene models, and aimed at detecting differential gene expression. This misses diversity generated by other mechanisms that diversify the transcriptome such as splicing and V(D)J recombination, and is blind to sequences missing from imperfect reference genomes. Here, we present sc-SPLASH, a highly efficient pipeline that extends our SPLASH framework for statistics-first, reference-free discovery to barcoded scRNA-seq (10x Chromium) and spatial transcriptomics (10x Visium); we also provide its optimized module for preprocessing and -mer counting in barcoded data, BKC, as a standalone tool.
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