Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) fine tune gene expression to regulate many aspects of nervous system physiology. Here, we show that miR-92a suppresses memory consolidation that occurs in the αβ and γ mushroom body neurons (MBns) of Drosophila, making miR-92a a memory suppressor miRNA. Bioinformatics analyses suggested that mRNAs encoding kinesin heavy chain 73 (KHC73), a protein that belongs to Kinesin-3 family of anterograde motor proteins, may be a functional target of miR-92a. Behavioral studies that employed expression of khc73 with and without its 3’ untranslated region (UTR) containing miR-92a target sites, luciferase assays in HEK cells with reporters containing wild-type and mutant target sequences in the khc73 3’UTR, and immunohistochemistry experiments involving KHC73 expression with and without the wild-type khc73 3’UTR, all point to the conclusion that khc73 is a major target of miR-92a in its functional role as a miRNA memory suppressor gene.
Footnotes
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants 1R35NS097224 (to R.L.D.) and 1P01NS090994 and David Van Vactor (Harvard).
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.