Alternative Splicing within the elk-1 5′ Untranslated Region Serves To Modulate Initiation Events Downstream of the Highly Conserved Upstream Open Reading Frame 2

Abstract

The 5′ untranslated region (UTR) plays a central role in the regulation of mammalian translation initiation. Key components include RNA structure, upstream AUGs (uAUGs), upstream open reading frames (uORFs), and internal ribosome entry site elements that can interact to modulate the readout. We previously reported the characterization of two alternatively spliced 5′ UTR isoforms of the human elk-1 gene. Both contain two uAUGs and a stable RNA stem-loop, but the long form (5′ UTR^L) was more repressive than the short form (5′ UTR^S) for initiation at the ELK-1 AUG. We now demonstrate that ELK-1 expression arises by a combination of leaky scanning and reinitiation, with the latter mediated by the small uORF2 conserved in both spliced isoforms. In HEK293T cells, a considerable fraction of ribosomes scans beyond the ELK-1 AUG in a reinitiation mode. These are sequestered by a series of out-of-frame AUG codons that serve to prevent access to a second in-frame AUG start site used to express short ELK-1 (sELK-1), an N-terminally truncated form of ELK-1 that has been observed only in neuronal cells. We present evidence that all these events are fine-tuned by the nature of the 5′ UTR and the activity of the α subunit of eukaryotic initiation factor 2 and provide insights into the neuronal specificity of sELK-1 expression.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/MCB.06751-11.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Plasmids expressing eIF2α WT, S51E, and S51A were kindly provided by Randal Kaufman and Janet Mitchell (HHMI). The PKR clone was kindly provided by Nahum Sonenberg and Olivier Donzé (McGill University, Canada). We thank Bernadino Conrad for his constructive comments about the work.

The work was supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Schmidheiny Foundation.