Skip Navigation


Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on December 23, 2007
Nucleic Acids Research 2008 36(4):1176-1186; doi:10.1093/nar/gkm1142
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow Print PDF (4860K) Freely available
Right arrow Screen PDF (716K) Freely available
Right arrow Supplementary Data
Right arrowOA All Versions of this Article:
36/4/1176    most recent
gkm1142v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (1)
Right arrow Commercial Re-use Guidelines
for Open Access NAR Content
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Braks, J. A. M.
Right arrow Articles by Waters, A. P.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Braks, J. A. M.
Right arrow Articles by Waters, A. P.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Nucleic Acids Research, 2008, Vol. 36, No. 4 1176-1186
© 2007 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

RNA

A conserved U-rich RNA region implicated in regulation of translation in Plasmodium female gametocytes

Joanna A. M. Braks, Gunnar R. Mair, Blandine Franke-Fayard, Chris J. Janse and Andrew P. Waters*

Department of Parasitology, Centre of Infectious Diseases, Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), Leiden, The Netherlands

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +44 141 330 3579; Fax: +44 141 330 5422; Email: waters{at}bio.gla.ac.uk

Received October 16, 2007. Revised November 22, 2007. Accepted December 7, 2007.

Translational repression (TR) plays an important role in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression and embryonic development in metazoans. TR also regulates the expression of a subset of the cytoplasmic mRNA population during development of fertilized female gametes of the unicellular malaria parasite, Plasmodium spp. which results in the formation of a polar and motile form, the ookinete. We report the conserved and sex-specific regulatory role of either the 3'- or 5'-UTR of a subset of translationally repressed mRNA species as shown by almost complete inhibition of expression of a GFP reporter protein in the female gametocyte. A U-rich, TR-associated element, identified previously in the 3'-UTR of TR-associated transcripts, played an essential role in mediating TR and a similar region could be found in the 5'-UTR shown in this study to be active in TR. The silencing effect of this 5'-UTR was shown to be independent of its position relative to its ORF, as transposition to a location 3' of the ORF did not affect TR. These results demonstrate for the first time in a unicellular organism that the 5' or the 3'-UTR of TR-associated transcripts play an important and conserved role in mediating TR in female gametocytes.

Present address: Andrew P. Waters, Department of Parasitology, University of Glasgow and Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology, Glasgow Biomedical Research Centre, Glasgow, Scotland, UK


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.