Journal Article

Detecting haplotype-specific transcript variation in long reads with FLAIR2

Tang, Alison D., Vollmers, Christopher, Brooks, Angela N., Felton, Colette, Volden, Roger, Hrabeta-Robinson, Eva

2024

Overview

Background RNA-seq has brought forth significant discoveries regarding aberrations in RNA processing, implicating these RNA variants in a variety of diseases. Aberrant splicing and single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in RNA have been demonstrated to alter transcript stability, localization, and function. In particular, the upregulation of ADAR, an enzyme that mediates adenosine-to-inosine editing, has been previously linked to an increase in the invasiveness of lung adenocarcinoma cells and associated with splicing regulation. Despite the functional importance of studying splicing and SNVs, the use of short-read RNA-seq has limited the community’s ability to interrogate both forms of RNA variation simultaneously. Results We employ long-read sequencing technology to obtain full-length transcript sequences, elucidating cis-effects of variants on splicing changes at a single molecule level. We develop a computational workflow that augments FLAIR, a tool that calls isoform models expressed in long-read data, to integrate RNA variant calls with the associated isoforms that bear them. We generate nanopore data with high sequence accuracy from H1975 lung adenocarcinoma cells with and without knockdown of ADAR . We apply our workflow to identify key inosine isoform associations to help clarify the prominence of ADAR in tumorigenesis. Conclusions Ultimately, we find that a long-read approach provides valuable insight toward characterizing the relationship between RNA variants and splicing patterns.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: A-to-I editing / ADAR / Adenocarcinoma / Adenocarcinoma of Lung - genetics / Adenosine Deaminase - genetics / Adenosine Deaminase - metabolism / Animal Genetics and Genomics / Annotations / Bioinformatics / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Cancer / carcinogenesis / Cell Line, Tumor / Consortia / Editing / enzymes / Evolutionary Biology / FLAIR / genome / Genomes / Haplotypes / Human Genetics / Humans / inosine / Inosine - genetics / Inosine - metabolism / Invasiveness / Isoforms / Kinases / Life Sciences / Localization / Long-read RNA-seq / Lung cancer / Lung Neoplasms - genetics / lungs / Microbial Genetics and Genomics / nanopores / Nucleotide sequence / Plant Genetics and Genomics / Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide / RNA / RNA Editing / RNA processing / RNA Splicing / RNA-Binding Proteins - genetics / RNA-Binding Proteins - metabolism / sequence analysis / Sequence Analysis, RNA / Software / Splicing / Tumorigenesis