https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-10-s1-s33

">
 

Document Type

Article

Subject Area(s)

Base Composition; Cytosine (analysis); Guanine (analysis); Nucleic Acid Conformation; RNA Interference; RNA, Messenger (chemistry, genetics); RNA, Small Interfering (chemistry, genetics); RNA, Untranslated (chemistry, genetics)

Abstract

BACKGROUND: RNA interference (RNAi) mediated by small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) or short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) has become a powerful technique for eukaryotic gene knockdown. siRNA GC-content negatively correlates with RNAi efficiency, and it is of interest to have a convincing mechanistic interpretation of this observation. We here examine this issue by considering the secondary structures for both the target messenger RNA (mRNA) and the siRNA guide strand. RESULTS: By analyzing a unique homogeneous data set of 101 shRNAs targeted to 100 endogenous human genes, we find that: 1) target site accessibility is more important than GC-content for efficient RNAi; 2) there is an appreciable negative correlation between GC-content and RNAi activity; 3) for the predicted structure of the siRNA guide strand, there is a lack of correlation between RNAi activity and either the stability or the number of free dangling nucleotides at an end of the structure; 4) there is a high correlation between target site accessibility and GC-content. For a set of representative structural RNAs, the GC content of 62.6% for paired bases is significantly higher than the GC content of 38.7% for unpaired bases. Thus, for a structured RNA, a region with higher GC content is likely to have more stable secondary structure. Furthermore, by partial correlation analysis, the correlation for GC-content is almost completely diminished, when the effect of target accessibility is controlled. CONCLUSION: These findings provide a target-structure-based interpretation and mechanistic insight for the effect of GC-content on RNAi efficiency.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-10-s1-s33

APA Citation

Chan, C., Carmack, C., Long, D., Maliyekkel, A., Shao, Y., Roninson, I., & Ding, Y. (2009). A structural interpretation of the effect of GC-content on efficiency of RNA interference. BMC Bioinformatics, 10(Suppl1). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-10-s1-s33

Rights

© 2009 Chan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Share

COinS