Very happy to see our or story showing how differential regulation of mRNA stability modulates transcriptional memory in budding yeast. A great work leaded by Bingnan Li in our lab.
Transcriptional memory is the process by which cells previously exposed to a stimulus respond faster to a second induction. Deletion of factors involved in chromatin organisation and transcription have been shown to decrease transcriptional memory.
We performed a genome-wide screen to identify new factors controlling this process in budding yeast. Surprisingly, we found that the depletion of components of the nuclear RNA exosome INCREASED transcriptional memory.
After discarding chromatin mediated effects, we realised that RNA degradation was differentially regulated in naïve and primed cells. And that this alteration leaded to both faster induction and repression memory in primed cells.
Thus, our work suggests the existence of coordination between “transcriptional” and “post-transcriptional memory” to facilitate swifter adaptation to changing environments.
- Differential regulation of mRNA stability modulates transcriptional memory and facilitates environmental adaptation. Li, B., Zeis, P., Zhang, Y. et al. Nat Commun 14, 910 (2023).
Stay tuned for our follow up work exploring similar questions in human cells and cancer.