Behavioural phenotyping of thunder mice with a hypomorphic mutation of heterogeneous nuclear ribonuclear protein L-like (hnRNPLL) and reduced T cell function

Landscape of Alternative Splicing Events Related to Prognosis and Immune Infiltration in Glioma: A Data Analysis and Basic Verification

Background

Glioma is a prevalent primary brain cancer with high invasiveness and typical local diffuse infiltration. Alternative splicing (AS), as a pervasive transcriptional regulatory mechanism, amplifies the coding capacity of the genome and promotes the progression of malignancies. This study was aimed at identifying AS events and novel biomarkers associated with survival for glioma.

Methods

RNA splicing patterns were collected from The Cancer Genome Atlas SpliceSeq database, followed by calculating the percentage of splicing index. Expression profiles and related clinical information of glioma were integrated based on the UCSC Xena database. The AS events in glioma were further analyzed, and glioma prognosis-related splicing factors were identified with the use of bioinformatics analysis and laboratory techniques. Further immune infiltration analysis was performed.

Results

Altogether, 9028 AS events were discovered. Upon univariate Cox analysis, 425 AS events were found to be related to the survival of patients with glioma, and 42 AS events were further screened to construct the final prognostic model (area under the curve = 0.974). Additionally, decreased expression of the splicing factors including Neuro-Oncological Ventral Antigen 1 (NOVA1), heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein C (HNRNPC), heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein L-like protein (HNRNPLL), and RNA-Binding Motif Protein 4 (RBM4) contributed to the poor survival in glioma. The immune infiltration analysis demonstrated that AS events were related to the proportion of immune cells infiltrating in glioma.

Conclusions

It is of great value for comprehensive consideration of AS events, splicing networks, and related molecular subtype clusters in revealing the underlying mechanism and immune microenvironment remodeling for glioma, which provides clues for the further verification of related therapeutic targets.

Loss of hnRNPLL-dependent splicing of Ptprc has no impact on B-cell development, activation and terminal differentiation into antibody-secreting cells

The RNA-binding protein heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein L-like (hnRNPLL) controls alternative splicing of protein tyrosine phosphatase receptor type C (Ptprc) which encodes CD45. hnRNPLL deficiency leads to a failure in silencing Ptprc exons 4-6 causing aberrant expression of the corresponding CD45 isoforms, namely, CD45RA, RB and RC. While an N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea-induced point mutation in murine Hnrnpll results in loss of peripheral naïve T cells, its role in B-cell biology remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that B-cell development in the bone marrow of Hnrnpll^thu/thu mice is normal and the number of mature B-cell subsets in the spleen and peritoneal cavity is comparable to control littermates. In response to in vivo immunization, Hnrnpll^thu/thu mice were deficient in generating germinal center (GC) B cells, and analysis of mixed bone marrow chimeras revealed that the GC B-cell deficiency was a B-cell extrinsic effect of the hnRNPLL mutation. Mature Hnrnpll^thu/thu B cells proliferated normally in response to various B-cell receptor- and Toll-like receptor-mediated stimuli. Similarly, in vitro stimulation of mutant B cells led to normal generation of plasmablasts, but mutant plasmablasts failed to downregulate B220 expression because of the inability of cells to undergo proper CD45 pre-messenger RNA alternative splicing. These findings collectively suggest that, like in T and natural killer T cells, the mutation disrupts hnRNPLL-mediated alternative splicing of the Ptprc gene in plasmablasts, but this dysregulation of Ptprc alternative splicing does not affect the development and function of B cells.