The Drosophila gene rbp9 encodes a protein that is a member of a conserved group of putative RNA binding proteins that are nervous system-specific in both flies and humans

Abstract

The rbp9 gene of Drosophila melanogaster has been molecularly characterized and shown to be expressed solely in the CNS, where it encodes proteins with three RNA recognition motifs (RRMs). Sequencing of genomic and cDNA clones of rbp9 revealed a complex gene with three alternative promoters as well as alternative patterns of splicing. The deduced amino acid sequence of the RBP9 proteins is highly similar to those of three other nervous system-specific genes, human HuC and HuD and Drosophila elav, which also encode proteins with three RRMs. Developmental Northern analysis revealed that rbp9 is expressed from the late third instar larva through adult stages. The RBP9 protein was detected specifically in nuclei of the nervous system after morphogenesis of the adult CNS in the mid-pupal stage. Thus, the RBP9 protein does not appear until substantially later than rbp9 transcripts are detected. The adult nervous system nuclear-limited expression pattern, the presence of RRMs, and the high similarity to a group of nervous system-specific proteins in flies and humans suggest that rbp9 belongs to a nervous system-specific RRM protein gene subfamily that may participate in the processing of RNAs involved in the development of the CNS.

RBP45 and RBP47, two oligouridylate-specific hnRNP-like proteins interacting with poly(A)+ RNA in nuclei of plant cells

“…In this work, we have characterized two N. plumbaginifolia nuclear RNA-binding proteins, RBP45 and RBP47+ The two proteins, and also their counterparts in A. thaliana, contain three RBD domains of which the two N-proximal domains are adjacent to each other and are separated from third one by a linker of variable length+ In their domain organization, the plant proteins resemble several families of three-RBD proteins identified in metazoa and yeast+ These families include metazoan ELAV-like proteins [e+g+, Drosophila elav, mammalian HuC, HuD, HuR, and Hel-N1 (Robinow et al+, 1988;Szabo et al+, 1991;Kim & Baker, 1993;King et al+, 1994;Good, 1995;Ma et al+, 1996;Antic & Keene, 1997)], metazoan TIA-1 and TIAR (Beck et al+, 1996;Dember et al+, 1996), yeast Nam8p (Gottschalk et al+, 1998) and Pub1p (Anderson et al+, 1993;Matunis et al+, 1993), some vertebrate hnRNP proteins [e+g+, hnRNP proteins F and H (Gamberi et al+, 1997, and references therein)], and also plant protein UBP1 + Although the exact function of only a few of these proteins is known, most are implicated in the regulation of mRNA processing or stability (Koushika et al+, 1996;Beck et al+, 1998;Fan & Steitz, 1998;Levy et al+, 1998;Peng et al+, 1998;Ford et al+, 1999;Gueydan et al+, 1999;Keene, 1999;Puig et al+, 1999;Lambermon et al+, 2000)+ Like plant RBP45 and RBP47, the metazoan and yeast proteins also contain auxiliary domains at their termini and/or in the region separating RBD2 and RBD3+…”

Post-Transcriptional Regulation of the GAP-43 Gene by Specific Sequences in the 3′ Untranslated Region of the mRNA

“…One is a 90 kDa molecular weight RNA-binding protein, the activity of which is dependent on protein phosphorylation (Kohn et al, 1996a). The other is a 45 kDa protein that recently was identified as a member of the elav family of neuronal-specific RNA-binding proteins (Robinow et al, 1988;Szabo et al, 1991;Kim and Baker, 1993;King et al, 1994). These proteins are involved in the development of the nervous system and are thought to regulate specific gene expression via post-transcriptional mechanisms (King et al, 1994;Chung et al, 1996).…”

Regulation and expression of elrD1 and elrD2 transcripts during early Xenopus laevis development

“…In Drosophila, three members of the elav/Hu have been isolated: elav (Yao et al, 1993), rbp9 (Kim and Baker, 1993) and fne (Samson and Chalvet, 2003). Members of this family have also been identified in human (Szabo et al, 1991), in the mouse Darnell, 1997), in Xenopus (Good, 1995), in chickens (Wakamatsu and Weston, 1997), in zebrafish (Park et al, 2000) and in Caenorhabditis elegans (Fujita et al, 1999).…”