Identification of protein interaction regions of VINC/NEAT1/Men epsilon RNA

Edited by Gianni Cesareni

Received 14 December 2009; received in revised form 3 February 2010; accepted 2 March 2010. published online 10 March 2010.

Abstract

The virus inducible non-coding RNA (VINC) was detected initially in the brain of mice infected with Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) and rabies virus. VINC is also known as NEAT1 or Men epsilon RNA. It is localized in the nuclear paraspeckles of several murine as well as human cell lines and is essential for paraspeckle formation. We demonstrate that VINC interacts with the paraspeckle protein, P54nrb through three different protein interaction regions (PIRs) one of which (PIR-1) is localized near the 5′ end while the other two (PIR-2, PIR-3) are localized near the 3′ region of VINC. Our studies suggest that VINC may interact with P54nrb through a novel mechanism which is different from that reported for protein coding RNAs.

Keywords: VINC, NEAT1, Men epsilon RNA, Non-coding RNA, Paraspeckle, P54nrb

Department of Biochemistry, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India

Corresponding author. Fax: +91 80 23601492.

PII: S0014-5793(10)00197-3

doi:10.1016/j.febslet.2010.03.003

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