Abstract
RNA is not a simple intermediate linking DNA and protein. RNA is widely transcribed from a variety of genomic regions, and extensive studies on the functional roles and regulations of noncoding RNAs including antisense RNAs and small RNAs are in progress. In addition, the human genome project revealed that we humans carry as few as ∼22,000 genes. Humans exploit tissue-specific and developmental stage-specific alternative splicing to generate a large variety of molecules in specific cells at specific developmental stages. Neurological disorders are also subject to aberrations of the splicing mechanisms. This review focuses mostly on splicing abnormalities due to pathological alterations of splicing cis-elements and trans-factors. Pathomechanisms associated with disrupted splicing cis-elements can be applied to any human diseases, and we did not restrict the descriptions to neurological diseases. On the other hand, we limited the descriptions of dysregulated splicing trans-factors to neurological disorders. Neurological diseases covered in this review include congenital myasthenic syndromes, spinal muscular atrophy, myotonic dystrophy, Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia with Parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17, facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome, Prader–Willi syndrome, Rett syndrome, spinocerebellar atrophy type 8, and paraneoplastic neurological disorders.
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Notes
- 1.
Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). NMD is a quality-assurance mechanism that degrades mRNAs harboring a premature termination codon (PTC) (Chang et al., 2007). Proteins translated from mRNAs harboring PTCs potentially have dominant-negative or deleterious activities. In pre-mRNA splicing, an exon–junction complex (EJC) is deposited 20–24 nucleotides upstream of each exon–exon junction. Ribosomes remove EJCs, but, in the presence of a PTC, EJCs stay on the transcript and trigger the NMD pathway in the cytoplasm.
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Acknowledgments
Works from the authors’ laboratories have been supported by Grants-in-Aid from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan, and from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare of Japan.
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Ohno, K., Masuda, A. (2011). RNA Pathologies in Neurological Disorders. In: Blass, J. (eds) Neurochemical Mechanisms in Disease. Advances in Neurobiology, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7104-3_14
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