Dissecting the role of RNA modification regulatory proteins in melanoma

The cover for issue 38 of Oncotarget features Figure 6, "A model summarizing the role of RNA modification genes in melanoma growth and development," by Malvi, et al.

Here, employing a comprehensive and unbiased analysis of different RNA modification regulatory proteins using various publicly available databases the researchers identify the most relevant RNA modifying proteins that plays a crucial role in melanoma development.

Their study started with the analysis of various genetic alterations as well as RNA overexpression of these RNA modification regulatory proteins in The Cancer Genome Atlas melanoma database.

The result of analysis revealed that only a subset of RNA modification regulatory proteins are overexpressed in >75% of melanoma patient cases as compared to normal skin.

Dr. Romi Gupta from the Department of Pathology at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, CT, 06510, USA as well as the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Birmingham, AL, 35233, USA said "Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer that account for over 80% of skin cancer-related death"

For example, transfer RNAs have been shown to contain the most extensive and diverse types of modification while ribosomal RNAs and non-coding RNA are also shown to contain many different post-transcriptional modifications.

Collectively, in this study, the authors investigated the epitranscriptomic landscape of melanoma using various publicly available database to identify the most relevant RNA modification regulatory proteins necessary for melanoma growth and validated DNMT3A and METTL4 as potential regulators of melanoma growth.

The Gupta research team concluded, "Additional future studies are needed to fully determine the role of these RNA modification regulatory proteins in melanoma tumor growth and progression."

Full text - https://www.oncotarget.com/article/26959/text/

Correspondence to - Romi Gupta - [email protected]

Keywords - RNA modifications, epitranscriptome, melanoma, MAPK, BRAF mutant melanoma