Genome-Wide Identification of Polyadenylation Dynamics with TED-Seq

Polyadenylation and deadenylation of mRNA are major RNA modifications associated with nucleus-to-cytoplasm translocation, mRNA stability, translation efficiency, and mRNA decay pathways. Our current knowledge of polyadenylation and deadenylation has been expanded due to recent advances in transcriptome-wide poly(A) tail length assays. Whereas these methods measure poly(A) length by quantifying the adenine (A) base stretch at the 3' end of mRNA, we developed a more cost-efficient technique that does not rely on A-base counting, called tail-end-displacement sequencing (TED-seq). Through sequencing highly size-selected 3' RNA fragments including the poly(A) tail pieces, TED-seq provides accurate measure of transcriptome-wide poly(A)-tail lengths in high resolution, economically suitable for larger scale analysis under various biologically transitional contexts.