arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Rotem Sorek.
A number of recent studies have hypothesized that sense-antisense RNA transcript pairs create dsRNA duplexes that undergo extensive A-to-I RNA editing. Here we studied human and mouse genomic antisense regions, and found that the editing level in these areas is negligible. This observation puts in question the scope of sense-antisense duplexes formation in-vivo, which is the basis for a number of proposed regulatory mechanisms.
A-To-I RNA editing is common to all eukaryotes, associated with various neurological functions. Recently, A-to-I editing was found to occur abundantly in the human transcriptome. Here we show that the frequency of A-to-I editing in humans is at least an order of magnitude higher as that of mouse, rat, chicken or fly. The extraordinary frequency of RNA editing in human is explained by the dominance of the primate-specific Alu element in the human transcriptome, which increases the number of double-stranded RNA substrates.