Institute of
bioorganic chemistry

Recently, a team of scientists from the Laboratory of molecular oncology IBCH RAS together with the colleagues from other Russian Institutes uncovered that human telomerase RNA, which was considered non-coding, has a coding potential. In human cells, there are several isoforms of the telomerase RNA transcript, and hTERC gene expression are not silenced when telomerase is inactivated. Authors hypothesized that the biogenesis of the primary transcript should determine the function of the end product of human telomerase RNA gene expression. Analyzing the influence of various factors of RNA biogenesis on the processing and transport of human telomerase RNA, scientists found that an elongated form of human telomerase RNA (mRNA encoding the previously identified hTERP protein) accumulates in the cytoplasm when mechanism of degradation of polyadenylated RNAs is inhibited. The results are published in the Biomedicines.