A Non-Coding RNA Involved In Sperm Maturation

A long and ever-expanding roster of small(~20-30nucleotides) RNAs has emerged during the last decade. However, there are insufficient publications on their primary forms, and no tissue-specific small RNAs precursors have been reported in the epididymis. Recently, a team of researchers, led by ZHANG Yonglian, at the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, CAS, indentified a novel noncoding RNA named HongrES2. It is a 1.6kb mRNA-like precursor that gives rise to a new microRNA-like small RNA(mil-HongrES2) involved in sperm maturation in rat epididymis.

 

Under the supervision of Professor ZHANG Yonglian, NI Minjie and her colleagues used the biochemistry and Cell biology methods to demonstrate that: [1] HongrES2 is a chimeric noncoding RNA, spliced from two different chromosomes (chro5 and chro19). [2] It’s 3’end from chromosome19 had 100% cDNA sequence homology at the 3’end with another epididymis-specific carboxylesterase named CES7. [3] HongrES2 could give rise to a ~23bp small RNA (mil-HongrES2) and the abundance was quite low, however, this biogenesis characters of mil-HongrES2 could be altered under a pathological context like epididymitis and the generation of mil-HongrES2 was shift in a high gear. [4]The protein product of CES7 can be downregulated by HongrES2 via mil-HongrES2 on cell level. This was confirmed in vivo by initiating mil-HongrES2 over-expression in rats and observing an effect on sperm capacitation. These preliminary findings revealed that HongrES2 plays a contributing factor in sperm epididymal maturation process as the precuror of a new small RNA. Therefore, further insight mechanims are nessary to be explored to explain how exactly this ncRNA works in the micro-enviroments for sperm maturation and whether it could play as a "guard gene" during epididymitis.

 

This work entitled "Identification and Characterization of a Novel Non-Coding RNA Involved in Sperm Maturation" was published online in PloS One.

 

The study was supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (SIBCB)

 

AUTHOR CONTACT:

ZHANG Yonglian

Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Shanghai, China

Phone: 86-21-54921153; E-mail: ylzhang@sibs.ac.cn