文章基本信息

标题：Efficient system for upstream mRNA trans-splicing to generate covalent, head-to-tail, protein multimers
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作者：Hiroaki Mitsuhashi ; Sachiko Homma ; Mary Lou Beermann 等
期刊名称：Scientific Reports
电子版ISSN：2045-2322
出版年度：2019
卷号：9
期号：1
页码：1-15
DOI：10.1038/s41598-018-36684-7
出版社：Springer Nature
摘要：We present a plasmid-based system in which upstream trans-splicing efficiently generates mRNAs that encode head-to-tail protein multimers. In this system, trans-splicing occurs between one of two downstream splice donors in the sequence encoding a C-terminal V5 epitope tag and an upstream splice acceptor in the 5' region of the pCS2(+) host plasmid. Using deletion and fusion constructs of the DUX4 protein as an example, we found that this system produced trans-spliced mRNAs in which coding regions from independent transcripts were fused in phase such that covalent head-to-tail protein multimers were translated. For a cDNA of ~450 bp, about half of the expressed proteins were multimeric, with the efficiency of trans-splicing and extent of multimer expression decreasing as cDNA length increased. This system generated covalent heterodimeric proteins upon co-transfections of plasmids encoding separate proteins and did not require a long complementary binding domain to position mRNAs for trans-splicing. This plasmid-based trans-splicing system is adaptable to multiple gene delivery systems, and it presents new opportunities for investigating molecular mechanisms of trans-splicing, generating covalent protein multimers with novel functions within cells, and producing mRNAs encoding large proteins from split precursors.