Crosslinking and immunoprecipitation (CLIP) methods are powerful techniques to interrogate direct protein-RNA interactions and dissect posttranscriptional gene regulatory networks. One widely used CLIP variant is photoactivatable ribonucleoside enhanced CLIP (PAR-CLIP) that involves in vivo labeling of nascent RNAs with the photoreactive nucleosides 4-thiouridine (4SU) or 6-thioguanosine (6SG), which can efficiently crosslink to interacting proteins using UVA and UVB light. Crosslinking of 4SU or 6SG to interacting amino acids changes their base-pairing properties and results in characteristic mutations in cDNA libraries prepared for high-throughput sequencing, which can be computationally exploited to remove abundant background from non-crosslinked sequences and help pinpoint RNA binding protein binding sites at nucleotide resolution on a transcriptome-wide scale. Here we present a streamlined protocol for fluorescence-based PAR-CLIP (fPAR-CLIP) that eliminates the need to use radioactivity. It is based on direct ligation of a fluorescently labeled adapter to the 3′end of crosslinked RNA on immobilized ribonucleoproteins, followed by isolation of the adapter-ligated RNA and efficient conversion into cDNA without the previously needed size fractionation on denaturing polyacrylamide gels. These improvements cut the experimentation by half to 2 days and increases sensitivity by 10–100-fold.

p53 is an intensely studied tumor-suppressive transcription factor. Recent studies suggest that the RNA-binding protein (RBP) ZMAT3 is important in mediating the tumor-suppressive effects of p53. Here, we globally identify ZMAT3-regulated RNAs and their binding sites at nucleotide resolution in intact colorectal cancer (CRC) cells. ZMAT3 binds to thousands of mRNA precursors, mainly at intronic uridine-rich sequences and affects their splicing. The strongest alternatively spliced ZMAT3 target was CD44, a cell adhesion gene and stem cell marker that controls tumorigenesis. Silencing ZMAT3 increased inclusion of CD44 variant exons, resulting in significant upregulation of oncogenic CD44 isoforms (CD44v) and increased CRC cell growth that was rescued by concurrent knockdown of CD44v. Silencing p53 phenocopied the loss of ZMAT3 with respect to CD44 alternative splicing, suggesting that ZMAT3-mediated regulation of CD44 splicing is vital for p53 function. Collectively, our findings uncover a p53-ZMAT3-CD44 axis in growth suppression in CRC cells.

Lung carcinoids are variably aggressive and mechanistically understudied neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs). Here, we identified and elucidated the function of a miR-375/yes-associated protein (YAP) axis in lung carcinoid (H727) cells. miR-375 and YAP are respectively high and low expressed in wild-type H727 cells. Following lentiviral CRISPR/Cas9-mediated miR-375 depletion, we identified distinct transcriptomic changes including dramatic YAP upregulation. We also observed a significant decrease in neuroendocrine differentiation and substantial reductions in cell proliferation, transformation, and tumor growth in cell culture and xenograft mouse disease models. Similarly, YAP overexpression resulted in distinct and partially overlapping transcriptomic changes, phenocopying the effects of miR-375 depletion in the same models as above. Transient YAP knockdown in miR-375-depleted cells reversed the effects of miR-375 on neuroendocrine differentiation and cell proliferation. Pathways analysis and confirmatory real-time PCR studies of shared dysregulated target genes indicate that this axis controls neuroendocrine related functions such as neural differentiation, exocytosis, and secretion. Taken together, we provide compelling evidence that a miR-375/YAP axis is a critical mediator of neuroendocrine differentiation and tumorigenesis in lung carcinoid cells.