Viruses have evolved in tandem with the organisms that they infect. Afflictions of the plant and animal kingdoms with viral infections have forced the host organism to evolve new or exploit existing systems to develop the countermeasures needed to offset viral insults. As one example, nonsense-mediated mRNA decay, a cellular quality-control mechanism ensuring the translational fidelity of mRNA transcripts, has been used to restrict virus replication in both plants and animals. In response, viruses have developed a slew of means to disrupt or become insensitive to NMD, providing researchers with potential new reagents that can be used to more fully understand NMD mechanism.
NONSENSE-MEDIATED mRNA DECAY IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS: AN OVERVIEWThe replication of genes during cell division, as well as gene expression (i.e. the synthesis of precursor-mRNAs, or pre-mRNAs, and the subsequent processing of pre-mRNAs to mRNAs), routinely results in low albeit detectable levels of mutations that can be deleterious. Before these mutations are etched into what is often the final effector of gene function, namely protein, it behooves the organism to eliminate them. As such, the cell has put in place quality-control systems to inspect and eliminate mRNAs that could affect fitness (Wolin and Maquat 2019). Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is one such Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press on May 4, 2021 -Published by rnajournal.cshlp.org Downloaded fromsystem. NMD eliminates transcripts that harbor a premature termination codon (PTC) and thereby could give rise to a truncated, non-functional or even toxic protein.In mammalian cells, NMD involves proteins coordinately attaching to, remodeling, and moving on RNAs. The machinery necessary for recognition of some NMD substrates is deposited during the process of gene transcription within nuclei, as reviewed extensively by Kurosaki and co-workers (Kurosaki et al. 2019) (Fig 1). For genes producing pre-mRNAs that undergo splicing, the act of splicing deposits a set of factors termed the exon-junction complex (EJC) at sites ~2024-nucleotides upstream of exonexon junctions, marking these locations. The nuclear EJC, composed of eukaryotic initiation factor 4A3 (eIF4A3), which is a helicase that anchors the EJC to the RNA, RNA-binding protein 8A (RBM8A; the mammalian homologue of Y14) and the protein mago nashi homolog (MAGOH), is further decorated with accessory factors and is maintained on spliced mRNAs during their export to the cytoplasm. There, mRNAs are initially translated while in complex with the capbinding complex (CBC), composed of cap-binding protein 80 (CBP80) and CBP20. Most termination codons are normally located in the final exon of mRNAs. However, should a ribosome terminate >5055-nucleotides upstream of an exonexon junction whose generation by splicing resulted in the deposition of an EJC, the ribosome will be unable to physically remove that EJC. Such termination events, which often occur at a PTC, allow eukaryotic release factor 1 (eRF1) and eRF3 to recruit the central NM...