Roquin promotes constitutive mRNA decay via a conserved class of stem-loop recognition motifs.
The degradation of TNFa mRNA is critical for restricting TNFa synthesis and involves a constitutive decay element (CDE) in the 3’ untranslated region of the mRNA. We demonstrate that the active CDE is a stem-loop RNA motif that is recognized by the RNA-binding protein Roquin. Deep sequencing of Roquin-associated mRNAs identified CDE-containing mRNAs as the primary targets of Roquin on a transcriptome-wide scale. Overall design: Expression profiles of LPS treated Raw264.7 cells (input), after Roquin IP or control IP were generated by deep sequencing, in three biological replicates, using Illumina HiSeq 2000.