Source: School of Life Sciences
Written by: School of Life Sciences
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

Nature Communications online published a research article entitled as ”The Role of Alternative Polyadenylation in the Antiviral Innate Immune Response” from Anlong Xu’s group at Sun Yat-sen University on 24th February (http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14605). In this article, they showed the genome-wide poly(A) sites switch in response to vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) infection in macrophages, indicating APA plays important role in the innate antiviral response. Prof. Anlong Xu is the corresponding author, Dr. Xin Jia, Prof. Shaochun Yuan and Dr. Yao Wang are co-first authors.

In the past decade, functions of many antiviral related genes together with transcriptome, proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics analyses after viral infection have been well revealed. However, the extent of 3’ UTR variation and the function of APA during the innate antiviral immune response are unclear. In order to fill up this gap, Anlong Xu’s group explored the global APA profile and characterized the dynamic APA-mediated regulation of antiviral responses using in vitro transcription-sequencing APA sites (IVT-SAPAS). They found average 3’ UTR length shortens gradually and numerous genes involved in immune-related pathways switched their poly(A) sites in response to VSV infection. Furthermore, when the core 3’ processing factors are knocked down, viral replication is affected, indicating the pivotal roles of 3’ UTR variation upon viral infection.