RNA editing

Introduction

post-transcriptional modification of RNA

Function

• for adenosine deaminases acting on RNA, gene mutations that change guanosine to adenosine may be deaminated to inosine
  • protein synthesis elongation reads inosine as guanosine
• RNA splicing is another mechanism for RNA editing
  • most of the time, cells splice together exons from the same pre-mRNA
  • RNA splicing using an exon from a different pre-mRNA is known as trans splicing
    • trans splicing facilitates introduction of custom exons into mRNA
      • but the process is inefficient
    • Cas proteins can cleave pre-mRNA at specific splice sites either eliminating the pre-mRNA fragments, rejoining the broken RNA strands minus the culprit exon or facilitating trans splicing

More general terms

• biochemistry

More specific terms

• mRNA editing