SONAR Discovers RNA-Binding Proteins from Analysis of Large-Scale Protein-Protein Interactomes

Mol Cell. 2016 Oct 20;64(2):282-293. doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2016.09.003. Epub 2016 Oct 6.

Abstract

RNA metabolism is controlled by an expanding, yet incomplete, catalog of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs), many of which lack characterized RNA binding domains. Approaches to expand the RBP repertoire to discover non-canonical RBPs are currently needed. Here, HaloTag fusion pull down of 12 nuclear and cytoplasmic RBPs followed by quantitative mass spectrometry (MS) demonstrates that proteins interacting with multiple RBPs in an RNA-dependent manner are enriched for RBPs. This motivated SONAR, a computational approach that predicts RNA binding activity by analyzing large-scale affinity precipitation-MS protein-protein interactomes. Without relying on sequence or structure information, SONAR identifies 1,923 human, 489 fly, and 745 yeast RBPs, including over 100 human candidate RBPs that contain zinc finger domains. Enhanced CLIP confirms RNA binding activity and identifies transcriptome-wide RNA binding sites for SONAR-predicted RBPs, revealing unexpected RNA binding activity for disease-relevant proteins and DNA binding proteins.

Keywords: RNA-binding proteins; machine-learning; protein-protein interaction networks; support vector machine.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Animals
  • Binding Sites
  • Cell Nucleus / chemistry
  • Cell Nucleus / metabolism
  • Cytoplasm / chemistry
  • Cytoplasm / metabolism
  • Drosophila melanogaster / genetics
  • Drosophila melanogaster / metabolism
  • Gene Expression
  • Gene Ontology
  • HEK293 Cells
  • Humans
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation*
  • Nucleotide Motifs
  • Protein Binding
  • Protein Interaction Domains and Motifs
  • RNA / chemistry*
  • RNA / genetics
  • RNA / metabolism
  • RNA-Binding Proteins / chemistry*
  • RNA-Binding Proteins / classification*
  • RNA-Binding Proteins / genetics
  • RNA-Binding Proteins / metabolism
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / genetics
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / metabolism
  • Software
  • Zinc Fingers

Substances

  • RNA-Binding Proteins
  • RNA