Transcriptional control by premature termination: a forgotten mechanism
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Genomics, Molecular Biology
- Keywords
- transcription attenuation, alternative polyadenylation (APA), alternative last exon (ALE), intronic polyadenylation (IPA), premature transcription termination
- Copyright
- © 2019 Kamieniarz-Gdula et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Transcriptional control by premature termination: a forgotten mechanism. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27590v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27590v1
Abstract
The concept of premature termination as an important means of transcriptional control is long established. Even so, its role in metazoan gene expression is underappreciated. Recent technological advances provide novel insights into premature transcription termination (PTT). PTT is very frequent and wide-spread, being either TSS-associated or intragenic. Stable prematurely terminated transcripts contribute to the transcriptome as instances of alternative polyadenylation. Independently of the transcript stability and function, PTT opposes the formation of full-length transcript thereby negatively regulating gene expression. In particular, the expression of many transcriptional regulators is controlled by PTT. PTT can be beneficial or harmful, depending on context. As a result multiple factors have evolved which control this process.
Author Comment
Submitted to Trends in Genetics as an invited review.