20-hydroxyecdysone mediates non-canonical regulation of mosquito vitellogenins through alternative splicing.

ABSTRACT: Vitellogenesis is one of the most well-studied physiological processes in mosquitoes. Expression of mosquito vitellogenin genes is classically described as being restricted to female adult reproduction. We report premature vitellogenin transcript expression in three vector mosquitoes: Culex tarsalis, Aedes aegypti and Anopheles gambiae. Vitellogenins expressed during non-reproductive stages are alternatively spliced to retain their first intron and encode premature termination codons. We show that intron retention results in transcript degradation by translation-dependent nonsense-mediated mRNA decay. This is probably an example of regulated unproductive splicing and translation (RUST), a mechanism known to regulate gene expression in numerous organisms but which has never been described i

SUBMITTER: Provost-Javier KN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4288586 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature