Transcripts have intrinsic propensity to form stable secondary structure that is fundamental to regulate RNA transcription, splicing, translation, RNA localization and turnover. Numerous methods that integrate chemical reactions with next-generation sequencing (NGS) have been applied to study in vivo RNA structure, providing new insights into RNA biology. Dimethyl sulfate (DMS) probing coupled with mutational profiling through NGS (DMS-MaPseq) is a newly developed method for revealing genome-wide or target-specific RNA structure. Herein, we present our experimental protocol of a modified DMS-MaPseq method for plant materials. The DMS treatment condition was optimized, and library preparation procedures were simplified. We also provided custom scripts for bioinformatic analysis of genome-wide DMS-MaPseq data. Bioinformatic results showed that our method could generate high-quality and reproducible data. Further, we assessed sequencing depth and coverage for genome-wide RNA structure profiling in Arabidopsis, and provided two examples of in vivo structure of mobile RNAs. We hope that our modified DMS-MaPseq method will serve as a powerful tool for analyzing in vivo RNA structurome in plants.
Keywords: Arabidopsis; Dimethyl sulfate; Genome-wide profiling; Next-generation sequencing; RNA structure; Thermostable group II intron reverse transcriptase.
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