This Article Full Text (PDF) Supplemental Research Data Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Murchison, E. P. Articles by Hannon, G. J. PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Murchison, E. P. Articles by Hannon, G. J. Related Content Related Articles Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Platypus Special/Letter

Conservation of small RNA pathways in platypus

¹ Watson School of Biological Sciences, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA; ² Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA; ³ Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02141, USA; ⁴ Discipline of Genetics, School of Molecular & Biomedical Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 5005 SA, Australia

Small RNA pathways play evolutionarily conserved roles in gene regulation and defense from parasitic nucleic acids. The character and expression patterns of small RNAs show conservation throughout animal lineages, but specific animal clades also show variations on these recurring themes, including species-specific small RNAs. The monotremes, with only platypus and four species of echidna as extant members, represent the basal branch of the mammalian lineage. Here, we examine the small RNA pathways of monotremes by deep sequencing of six platypus and echidna tissues. We find that highly conserved microRNA species display their signature tissue-specific expression patterns. In addition, we find a large rapidly evolving cluster of microRNAs on platypus chromosome X1, which is unique to monotremes. Platypus and echidna testes contain a robust Piwi-interacting (piRNA) system, which appears to be participating in ongoing transposon defense.

E-mail hannnon{at}cshl.edu; fax (516) 367-8874.

[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org. microRNA sequences have been submitted to miRBase at http://microrna.sanger.ac.uk/sequences/. piRNA sequences can be accessed on GEO at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/, accession number GSE10571.]

Article publised online before print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.073056.107.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

Related Articles

Bird-like sex chromosomes of platypus imply recent origin of mammal sex chromosomes

Frédéric Veyrunes, Paul D. Waters, Pat Miethke, Willem Rens, Daniel McMillan, Amber E. Alsop, Frank Grützner, Janine E. Deakin, Camilla M. Whittington, Kyriena Schatzkamer, Colin L. Kremitzki, Tina Graves, Malcolm A. Ferguson-Smith, Wes Warren, and Jennifer A. Marshall Graves
Genome Res. 2008 0: 71019081-0. [Abstract] [PDF]