Marcos Morgan: The blog
Saturday 8 April 2017
Career in Biology
I am a postdoc at the MRC centre for regenerative medicine of the University of Edinburgh, in the laboratory of Donal O’Carroll
I started my am postdoc at EMBL in an interdisciplinary project between the laboratories of Donal at EMBL monterotondo and Anton Enright at EMBL-EBI.
Research achievements during my
PhD.
CPEB2 subfamily 3'UTRs
Background. Developmental
biology in higher organisms critically depends on RNA mediated gene expression
regulation. As a consequence, the length and complexity of 3' untranslated
regions (3'UTRs) of mRNAs is dramatically expanded in mammals. The aim of my
Ph.D. was to make sense of the different signatures present in the 3’UTRs, in
particular miRNA targets and highly conserved elements.
Research. I showed that
CPEB2, CPEB3 and CPEB4 transcripts are regulated by a shared ancestral miRNA
signature1. Moreover, I showed that the miRNA binding sites preceded the
generation of highly conserved elements in their 3'UTRs (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The 3’UTRs of CPEB2, CPEB3 and CPEB4 share
an ancestral miRNA signature that preceded the generation of highly conserved
elements. a,
Evolution of the CPEB2 subfamily consisting of two duplications preceding
vertebrate speciation. The 3’UTR of the ancestral and current CPEBs for
different vertebrates is depicted. The binding sites for different miRNA are
indicated. b, Alignment of segments
of human CPEB2, CPEB3 and CPEB4 3’UTRs. c,
Alignment of the same segment of CPEB2 3’UTRs now between different
vertebrates. The binding sites for mir-26 and mir-92 are shown.
3'UTR annotation
The explosion
of genomic and transcriptomic data created a bottleneck in the gene annotation
pipelines at the level of data analysis. While working on the CPEBs, I noticed
that the long 3'UTR isoforms of these and other genes were mis-annotated.
Importantly, these isoforms were highly conserved across vertebrates and
abundantly expressed in the brain (Figure 2). I then moved on to develop
different approaches to annotate 3'UTRs in vertebrates. I found a few hundred
mis-annotated genes in mice and humans and a few thousand in other vertebrates2. I also showed that long 3'UTRs tend to be misclassified as long
non-coding RNAs.
Figure 2. Identification of 3’ ends for transcripts
encoding different K+ channels. a, Genomic
region encoding the 3’UTRs of Kcnq3 (left panel) and Kcnb1 (right panel). The
annotated transcripts are shown on top (Ensembl) together with mapping ESTs,
the conservation score for the genomic region (PhyloP) and RNASeq reads from
brain (B), testis (T) and heart (H). The proposed 3’ ends are indicated with colored
arrowheads. b, Northern blots of
brain (B), testis (T) and heart (H) using probes for Kcnq3 (left) and Kcnb1
(right) are shown. The bands corresponding to the proposed new 3’ ends are
indicated by the arrowheads.
Perspective. In the study
of the CPEB transcripts, I showed that miRNA binding sites embedded in highly
conserved stretches of 3’UTRs are functional and more interestingly, they also
preceded the formation of these highly conserved elements. Also, the
annotations that we proposed for conserved 3’UTRs were later validated by
others3 and with time incorporated to the commonly used databases.
1. Morgan, M., Iaconcig, A. & Muro, A.
F. CPEB2, CPEB3 and CPEB4 are coordinately regulated by miRNAs recognizing
conserved binding sites in paralog positions of their 3’-UTRs. Nucleic Acids
Res. 38, 7698–7710 (2010).
2. Morgan, M., Iaconcig, A. & Muro, A.
F. Identification of 3’ gene ends using transcriptional and genomic
conservation across vertebrates. BMC Genomics 13, 708 (2012).
3. Miura, P. et al. Widespread and
extensive lengthening of 3 ′ UTRs in the mammalian brain Widespread and
extensive lengthening of 3 9 UTRs in the mammalian brain. 812–825 (2013).
doi:10.1101/gr.146886.112
Monday 3 April 2017
Research achievements during my undergraduate studies
Research achievements during my
undergraduate studies.
Morgan, M. Models for the recent evolution of protocadherin
gene clusters. Biocell 32, 9–26 (2008).
Background. The early
2000s were characterized by an explosion in the number of genomes sequenced for
different species. With the preliminary annotation of the vertebrates’ genomes,
the clustered protocadherins emerged as the strongest candidates to provide
single cell identity to neurons. I decided to look at their evolution to gain insights
about their function.
Research. I showed how the
protocadherin gene clusters evolved in human and mouse after the divergence of
the species (Morgan, 2008). In particular, I found that a unique unit of evolution explains all
the recent duplication events for all the protocadherin clusters (Figure 1).
Perspective. The unit of evolution turned out to encode for the C-terminal region of a protocadherin together with the promoter region and the N-terminal region of the protocadherin immediately downstream in the cluster. Whether this form of evolution has functional implication is not known.
Perspective. The unit of evolution turned out to encode for the C-terminal region of a protocadherin together with the promoter region and the N-terminal region of the protocadherin immediately downstream in the cluster. Whether this form of evolution has functional implication is not known.
Figure 1. Evolution of part of the human b-protocadherin cluster. Each block
represents a gene. The light colored part of the gene encodes for the C-terminal
portion of the protein.
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