Transcription Factor Wilms' Tumor 1 Regulates Developmental Rnas Through 3 ′ UTR Interaction
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Downloaded from genesdev.cshlp.org on September 25, 2021 - Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press RESEARCH COMMUNICATION ’ Furthermore, WT1 is a key regulator of the balance be- Transcription factor Wilms tween mesenchymal and epithelial states in these tissues, tumor 1 regulates being required for the mesenchyme-to-epithelial transi- tion (MET), a key step in nephron formation, and the epi- developmental RNAs through thelial-to-mesenchyme transition (EMT) that produces ′ coronary vascular progenitors from the epicardium. WT1 3 UTR interaction also plays essential roles in adult tissue homeostasis. Ruthrothaselvi Bharathavikru,1,5 Hence, ubiquitous deletion of Wt1 in adult mice leads to Tatiana Dudnakova,2,5 Stuart Aitken,1 Joan Slight,1 acute kidney glomerulosclerosis, atrophy of the exocrine pancreas and spleen, and widespread reduction in bone Mara Artibani,1,4 Peter Hohenstein,1,3 2 1 and fat (Chau et al. 2011). A recent study showed that David Tollervey, and Nick Hastie WT1 is reactivated during tissue repair and adult tumori- genesis, where it is required in the mesenchymal compo- 1Medical Research Council Institute of Genetics and Molecular nentand vasculaturefortumor growth(Wagneret al. 2014). Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Western General Hospital, The molecular mechanisms by which WT1 fulfils these Edinburgh EH4 2XU, United Kingdom; 2Wellcome Trust Centre apparently diverse roles have been attributed to its tran- for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3BF, scriptional function. Accordingly, there is substantial ev- United Kingdom; 3Roslin Institute, The University of Edinburgh, idence that WT1 binds genomic DNA and regulates Easter Bush, Midlothian EH25 9RG, United Kingdom transcription, acting as either an activator or a repressor Wilms’ tumor 1 (WT1) is essential for the development (Essafi et al. 2011; Toska and Roberts 2014). A growing and homeostasis of multiple mesodermal tissues. Despite number of physiological WT1 transcriptional targets evidence for post-transcriptional roles, no endogenous have been identified in development, homeostasis, and WT1 target RNAs exist. Using RNA immunopreci- disease (Motamedi et al. 2014; Dong et al. 2015; Kann et al. 2015). However, the evidence suggests that tran- pitation and UV cross-linking, we show that WT1 binds ′ scriptional regulation is not the only WT1 function. preferentially to 3 untranslated regions (UTRs) of devel- The two major essential isoforms (Barbaux et al. 1997; opmental targets. These target mRNAs are down-regulat- Hammes et al. 2001) conserved throughout vertebrate evo- ed upon WT1 depletion in cell culture and developing lution are created by an alternative splice that inserts three kidney mesenchyme. Wt1 deletion leads to rapid turnover amino acids (lysine–threonine–serine [KTS]) between the of specific mRNAs. WT1 regulates reporter gene expres- third and fourth zinc finger (Hastie 2001). The first sugges- sion through interaction with 3′ UTR-binding sites. Com- tion that WT1 may function post-transcriptionally came bining experimental and computational analyses, we from Larsson et al. (1995), who showed that the +KTS iso- propose that WT1 influences key developmental and dis- forms associatewith splicing factors. WT1 wasthen shown ease processes in part through regulating mRNA turnover. to integrate into active splice complexes by interacting with the splicing factor U2AF65 (Davies et al. 1998). More- Supplemental material is available for this article. over, WT1 binds both RNA and DNA with similar binding efficiencies, as demonstrated by structural and kinetic Received October 4, 2016; revised version accepted studies (Caricasole et al. 1996; Bardeesy and Pelletier February 15, 2017. 1998; Zhai et al. 2001). Structural modeling studies also identified an RNA recognition motif (RRM) in WT1 (Ken- nedy et al. 1996). Further support for post-transcriptional The different steps in gene expression, from transcription roles for WT1 was provided by Niksic et al. (2004), who through a series of post-transcriptional events, are closely showed that all isoforms shuttle between the nucleus and interconnected, and some multifunctional proteins regu- cytoplasm, where they are located on actively translating late several points in this pathway. One potential example ribosomes. In particular, the +KTS isoforms were shown is the Wilms’ tumor gene WT1. Mice lacking Wt1 die at to recruit transcripts containing a viral RNA sequence to mid-gestation through defective coronary vasculature, suf- polysomes, regulating their translation (Bor et al. 2006). fer from congenital diaphragmatic hernia, and have no kid- A considerable amount of data therefore support roles neys, gonads, spleen, or adrenals. All of these defects can be for WT1 from splicing through to translation. However, traced to a key role for WT1 in the development of tissues causal evidence for direct WT1 functions in specific steps derived from the intermediate and lateral plate mesoderm. and understanding of the mechanisms involved have been In humans, germline WT1 mutations lead to the epony- limited by the absence of characterized endogenous WT1 mous pediatric cancer, genitourinary anomalies, and, in RNA targets. To address this, we identified WT1-in- some cases, congenital diaphragmatic hernia and heart dis- teracting RNAs in mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells and ease (Chau and Hastie 2012). a mesonephric cell line by a combination of RNA immu- noprecipitation (RIP) and sequencing (RIP-seq) and a mod- [Keywords: WT1; FLASH; 3′ UTR; hybrids; RNA secondary structures; ification of the CLASH (cross-linking ligation and developmental pathways] sequencing of hybrids) UV cross-linking technique (Hel- 4Present address: Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University wak et al. 2013) termed FLASH (formaldehyde-assisted of Oxford, Oxford OX3 9DS, United Kingdom. 5These authors contributed equally to this work. Corresponding author: [email protected] Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are on- © 2017 Bharathavikru et al. This article, published in Genes & Develop- line at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.291500.116. Freely ment, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution 4.0 In- available online through the Genes & Development Open Access option. ternational), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. GENES & DEVELOPMENT 31:347–352 Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; ISSN 0890-9369/17; www.genesdev.org 347 Downloaded from genesdev.cshlp.org on September 25, 2021 - Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Bharathavikru et al. cross-linking and sequencing of hybrids). The latter identi- RNAs (snoRNAs). Closer examination of the position of fies RNAs that interact directly with WT1 as well as RNA– significant clusters on protein-coding genes revealed high- RNA duplexes formed by these target RNAs. The interac- er recovery of sequences at the 5′ and 3′ ends of transcripts tion of intramolecular RNA hybrids is increased in the and the UTRs (Fig. 1B). A number of transcripts had nota- presence of WT1. This study provides strong evidence bly high read coverage, including those for Igfbp5, shown that the tumor suppressor protein WT1 regulates physio- as an example in Figure 1C. logically important RNAs and their stability through in- To confirm the sequence data, RIP reactions were per- teractions with 3′ untranslated regions (UTRs). formed followed by PCR across different regions of select- ed protein-coding transcripts (Fig. 1D; Supplemental Fig. S1C). For most of the selected targets, including Igfbp5, Results and Discussion the results were in good agreement with the RIP-seq anal- ysis, showing significant enrichment toward the 3′ UTR. WT1 binds to multiple categories of RNA In order to assess the functional relevance of the WT1-in- RIP (Bharathavikru and Dudnakova 2016) was performed teracting RNA, a gene ontology (GO) analysis was per- on ES cells and mesonephric M15 cells along with nega- formed. Several developmental pathways that are tive control RIP to identify RNAs that interact with regulated by WT1 were identified as significant GO cate- endogenous WT1. The specificity of the antibody was gories in this analysis, including coronary vasculature de- verified by immuno-pull-down and Western blotting velopment and the wnt signaling pathway (Supplemental (Supplemental Fig. S1A). Recovered RNAs were identified Fig. S1D,E; Supplemental Tables S1, S2). by RT–PCR and Illumina sequencing. Overall numbers of reads obtained are shown in Supplemental Figure S1B. ′ Reads were mapped to the mouse genome and analyzed UV cross-linking confirms WT1 enrichment over the 3 for different RNA categories (Fig. 1A). RIP data were pro- UTR of mRNAs cessed to identify regions in which the number of uniquely To identify specific protein–RNA interaction sites, we aligned reads passed statistical significance (false discov- adopted a UV cross-linking approach. Since ncRNAs ery rate [FDR] < 0.05; minimum of five reads), and overlap- were identified among WT1-interacting RNA (Fig. 1A), ping regions of aligned reads were clustered (minimum of we applied an experimental strategy that can identify five reads) using pyCRAC software (Webb et al. 2014). RNA–RNA interactions. The CLASH technique can iden- The RNA biotypes of these clusters were determined using tify both RNA–protein and RNA–RNA interactions but Ensembl annotations. Strikingly, WT1 targets were pre- requires the use of epitope-tagged