The main finding from this paper is the discovery that a protein known as CFIm regulates the alternative polyadenylation of Pten, in other words that it controls the length of the Pten messenger RNA. CFIm also affects the alternative polyadenylation of other genes, but Pten is of particular interest as it is involved in the PI3K/Akt pathway which is central to cancer. Interestingly, they also found that 2 sub-components of CFIm, known as CFIm59 and CFIm68, have opposing effect on alternative polyadenylation.
Cynthia believes that this paper stands out from other papers in the field as it is the first to show that CFIm59 and CFIm68 have contrasting effects on alternative polyadenylation, as previous studies had been merely describing CFIm59 as a weaker version of CFIm68. She thinks that researchers could expand on this surprising and intriguing discovery by digging into the molecular mechanism that would explain these opposing properties.
When asked about her favorite aspect of this project, Cynthia revealed that she had a lot of fun playing around with the deep sequencing datasets and creating plots to highlight the data from different angles. She is glad that this project gave her the opportunity to practice and put to use her passion for bioinformatics analysis. This project also helped her grow as a scientist as the process of preparing and revising the manuscript taught her how to put together a cohesive story from seemingly scattered pieces of data.
Congratulations to members of the Duchaine and Topisirovic labs for their hard work and for this exciting publication!
If you would like to contact Cynthia, you can reach out to her at: hsin.w.tseng [at] mail.mcgill.ca
Read the paper:
Hsin-Wei Tseng, Anthony Mota-Sydor, Rania Leventis, Predrag Jovanovic, Ivan Topisirovic, Thomas F Duchaine, Distinct, opposing functions for CFIm59 and CFIm68 in mRNA alternative polyadenylation of Pten and in the PI3K/Akt signalling cascade, Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 50, Issue 16, 9 September 2022, Pages 9397–9412, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac704