title: Conserved tissue expression signatures of intronic noncoding RNAs transcribed from human and mouse loci.
abstract: It has been postulated that noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) are involved in the posttranscriptional control of gene expression, and may have contributed to the emergence of the complex attributes observed in mammalians. We show here that the complement of ncRNAs expressed from intronic regions of the human and mouse genomes comprises at least 78,147 and 39,660 transcriptional units, respectively. To identify conserved intronic sequences expressed in both humans and mice, we used custom-designed human cDNA microarrays to separately interrogate RNA from mouse and human liver, kidney, and prostate tissues. An overlapping tissue expression signature was detected for both species, comprising 198 transcripts; among these, 22 RNAs map to intronic regions with evidence of evolutionary conservation in humans and mice. Transcription of selected human-mouse intronic ncRNAs was confirmed using strand-specific RT-PCR. Altogether, these results support an evolutionarily conserved role of intronic ncRNAs in human and mouse, which are likely to be involved in the fine tuning of gene expression regulation in different mammalian tissues.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Bioquímica, Instituto de Química, Universidade de São Paulo, 05508-900 São Paulo, Brasil.
authors.forename: Rodrigo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Louro
authors.forename: Tarik
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: El-Jundi
authors.forename: Helder I
authors.initials: HI
authors.lastname: Nakaya
authors.forename: Eduardo M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Reis
authors.forename: Sergio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Verjovski-Almeida
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D016678:Genome; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D007438:Introns / Q000235:genetics / Q000502:physiology*; D051379:Mice; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D022661:RNA, Untranslated / Q000235:genetics / Q000502:physiology*; D014158:Transcription, Genetic
chemical_list: D022661:RNA, Untranslated