Post-transcriptional editing of apolipoprotein B (apoB) mRNA is regulated in hepatic cells to achieve a steady state proportion of edited and unedited RNA molecules. This activity is catalyzed by APOBEC-1 (apoB mRNA editing catalytic subunit 1) in what has been widely accepted as nuclear event occurring during or after mRNA splicing. Introns impair the efficiency of editing within an adjacent exon in a distance-dependent manner in reporter RNAs. We show here that this inhibition can be overcome by overexpressing APOBEC-1 and that the enhanced editing efficiency on these reporter RNAs occurred after splicing on cytoplasmic transcripts. Given the absolute requirement of auxiliary proteins in apoB mRNA editing, the data suggested that auxiliary proteins were distributed with APOBEC-1 in both the nucleus and cytoplasm of McArdle cells. In fact, immunolocalization of one such auxiliary protein, APO-BEC-1 complementation factor (ACF) demonstrated a nuclear and cytoplasmic distribution. We also demonstrate that in the absence of alterations in APOBEC-1 expression, changes in edited apoB RNA induced by ethanol arise through the stimulation of nuclear editing activity. The finding that apoB mRNA editing can occur in the cytoplasm but normally does not suggests that under biological conditions, restricting editing activity to the nucleus must be an important step in regulating the proportion of the edited apoB mRNAs.
Apolipoprotein B (apoB)1 mRNA editing involves a site-specific deamination reaction wherein a cytidine at nucleotide 6666 is changed to a uridine thereby placing an in frame UAA stop codon within the 14-kilobase apoB mRNA (1, 2). Translation of the unedited and edited variants of apoB mRNA generates two isoforms of apoB proteins, apoB100 and apoB48, which behave differently in terms of lipoprotein secretion and uptake by peripheral cells (3). A tripartite RNA sequence motif, consisting of an 11-nucleotide mooring sequence, a spacer, and a regulatory element, is required for site-specific RNA editing (4 -8). Recently, a stem-loop model of secondary structure involving the essential sequence required for editing has been proposed (9, 10). These cis-acting elements are required for the assembly of an editing complex, the C/U editosome (5, 11), and site-specific editing activity. APOBEC-1, the cytidine deaminase responsible for editing (12), is the catalytic subunit of the editosome (9) and may function in this capacity as a dimer (13,14).APOBEC-1 alone cannot edit apoB mRNA and requires multiple yet-to-be characterized proteins referred to collectively as the auxiliary proteins (15-20). Auxiliary proteins are broadly expressed in mammalian cell lines and tissues, independent of the expression of APOBEC-1 and apoB mRNA (12, 16 -18, 21). Recently, APOBEC-1 complementation factor (ACF) has been cloned (40). ACF is 64.3-kDa RNA binding protein, it binds to apoB mRNA in vitro and in vivo. ACF and APOBEC-1 comprise the minimal protein requirements for specific and efficient editing of apoB mRNA in vitro. Other candida...