Multifunctional RNA-binding proteins influence mRNA abundance and translational efficiency of distinct sets of target genes
Fig 4
Differential affinity of multifunctional RBPs for 5’ UTR structures often drives opposite quantitative TE effects.
(A) Dot plot displaying the significance of the differences in 5’ UTR minimum free energy (MFE, normalized by length) between target genes that correlate positively or negatively with each multifunctional RBP. Significance values are calculated separately for mRNA (green) and TE (brown) targets. Adjusted p-values are shown on a -log10 scale and calculated using the Wilcoxon Rank Sum test and only 5’ UTR sequences with a minimum length of 20 nucleotides were evaluated. A dashed vertical line indicates the minimum adjusted p-value to consider the differences in MFE as significant (padj < 0.05). (B) Box and violin plots with length normalized MFE scores for positively and negatively correlated TE targets corresponding to the three selected multifunctional RBPs with the highest significance (Wilcoxon rank sum test) in Fig 4A (DDX3X, EFTUD2, PRPF8). For comparison, non-correlating target genes were included in the panel figure. (C) Three-way Venn Diagram representing the overlap in the number of TE targets for the three selected RBPs. The heatmap represents TE correlations of 156 shared target genes for the three cases.