SF3B1 Gene Expression in Erythroid Cells Is Regulated By Intron Retention Via a Posttranscriptional Mechanism Involving Cryptic Exons Proposed to Function As Splicing Decoys

Proper expression of the MDS-disease gene, SF3B1, ensures appropriate pre-mRNA splicing in erythroid progenitors and during terminal erythropoiesis. We previously showed that the SF3B1 gene is post-transcriptionally regulated in a differentiation stage-specific manner by intron retention (IR), such that ~50% of its transcripts in mature erythroblasts retain intron 4. Based on new mechanistic studies, we propose a model in which mostly unannotated and noncoding exons within intron 4 function as splicing decoys; i.e., they promote retention of intron 4 by interacting with, and blocking splice sites of, the adjacent exons 4 and 5. A total of six putative decoy exons were revealed via RT-PCR and RNA-seq analysis of RNA from erythroblasts treated with inhibitors of nonsense-mediated decay. That decoy exons have IR-promoting activity is suggested by several criteria. First, the frequency of interaction between constitutive exons 4 and 5 and putative decoy exons within intron 4, measured by the abundance of splice junctions in RNA-seq read data, is temporally correlated with levels of intron 4 retention during terminal erythropoiesis. Both IR and decoy splice junctions were low in early stage erythroblasts and much higher in mature erythroblasts. Second, selected decoy exons exhibited IR-promoting activity in the context of minigene splicing reporters expressing the exon 3-6 region of SF3B1 in transfected K562 cells. The wild type minigene reproduced the intron-specific retention phenotype, since it was fully spliced at introns 3 and 5 but exhibited substantial retention of intron 4, whereas deletion of decoy exon 4e, or mutation of its splice sites, substantially decreased IR. Third, RBP (RNA binding protein) cross-linking data from K562 cells show that 3' splice site factors including U2AF1 and U2AF2 can bind specifically to 3' splice sites of intron 4's decoy exons. Finally, several experiments showed that IR-promoting activity of decoy exons is a more general phenomenon that likely governs IR in other erythroid genes. We observed not only that SF3B1 intron 4 decoy exons could promote IR in heterologous contexts, but also that predicted decoy exons from other erythroblast transcripts could promote IR in the SF3B1 minigene. Apart from this experimental data, comparative genomics revealed that the SF3B1 decoy exons are extremely conserved among vertebrate genomes, with two of the exons being essentially identical from fish to humans. Together this data supports the hypothesis that a subset of up-regulated IR events in late erythroblasts are controlled by decoy exons that block productive splicing at the flanking exons. We propose that regulated IR is an important post-transcriptional mechanism for adjusting cellular splicing capacity during terminal erythropoiesis by regulating expression of key splicing factors such as SF3B1.