Highly Accessed Opinion

The birth of the Epitranscriptome: deciphering the function of RNA modifications

Yogesh Saletore123, Kate Meyer4, Jonas Korlach5, Igor D Vilfan5, Samie Jaffrey4 and Christopher E Mason12*

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY 10065, USA

2 The HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY 10065, USA

3 Tri-Institutional Training Program in Computational Biology and Medicine, New York, NY10065, USA

4 Department of Pharmacology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY 10065, USA

5 Pacific Biosciences, 1380 Willow Rd, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA

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Genome Biology 2012, 13:175 doi:10.1186/gb-2012-13-10-175

Published: 31 October 2012

Abstract

Recent studies have found methyl-6-adenosine in thousands of mammalian genes, and this modification is most pronounced near the beginning of the 3' UTR. We present a perspective on current work and new single-molecule sequencing methods for detecting RNA base modifications.

Keywords:
epigenetics; epigenomics; epitranscriptome; m6A; methyl-6-adenosine; methyladenosine; N6-methyladenosine; RNA modifications