International Journal of Molecular Sciences Article 0 5 Untranslated Region Elements Show High Abundance and Great Variability in Homologous ABCA Subfamily Genes Pavel Dvorak 1,2,* , Viktor Hlavac 2,3 and Pavel Soucek 2,3 1 Department of Biology, Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen, Charles University, 32300 Pilsen, Czech Republic 2 Biomedical Center, Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen, Charles University, 32300 Pilsen, Czech Republic;
[email protected] (V.H.);
[email protected] (P.S.) 3 Toxicogenomics Unit, National Institute of Public Health, 100 42 Prague, Czech Republic * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +420-377593263 Received: 7 October 2020; Accepted: 20 November 2020; Published: 23 November 2020 Abstract: The 12 members of the ABCA subfamily in humans are known for their ability to transport cholesterol and its derivatives, vitamins, and xenobiotics across biomembranes. Several ABCA genes are causatively linked to inborn diseases, and the role in cancer progression and metastasis is studied intensively. The regulation of translation initiation is implicated as the major mechanism in the processes of post-transcriptional modifications determining final protein levels. In the current bioinformatics study, we mapped the features of the 50 untranslated regions (50UTR) known to have the potential to regulate translation, such as the length of 50UTRs, upstream ATG codons, upstream open-reading frames, introns, RNA G-quadruplex-forming sequences, stem loops, and Kozak consensus motifs, in the DNA sequences of all members of the subfamily. Subsequently, the conservation of the features, correlations among them, ribosome profiling data as well as protein levels in normal human tissues were examined. The 50UTRs of ABCA genes contain above-average numbers of upstream ATGs, open-reading frames and introns, as well as conserved ones, and these elements probably play important biological roles in this subfamily, unlike RG4s.