Shinichi Fukuda, Akhil Varshney, Benjamin J Fowler, Shao-Bin Wang, Siddharth Narendran, Kameshwari Ambati, Tetsuhiro Yasuma, Joseph Magagnoli, Hannah Leung, Shuichiro Hirahara, Yosuke Nagasaka, Reo Yasuma, Ivana Apicella, Felipe Pereira, Ryan D Makin, Eamonn Magner, Xinan Liu, Jian Sun, Mo Wang, Kirstie Baker, Kenneth M Marion, Xiwen Huang, Elmira Baghdasaryan, Meenakshi Ambati, Vidya L Ambati, Akshat Pandey, Lekha Pandya, Tammy Cummings, Daipayan Banerjee, Peirong Huang, Praveen Yerramothu, Genrich V Tolstonog, Ulrike Held, Jennifer A Erwin, Apua C M Paquola, Joseph R Herdy, Yuichiro Ogura, Hiroko Terasaki, Tetsuro Oshika, Shaban Darwish, Ramendra K Singh, Saghar Mozaffari, Deepak Bhattarai, Kyung Bo Kim, James W Hardin, Charles L Bennett, David R Hinton, Timothy E Hanson, Christian Röver, Keykavous Parang, Nagaraj Kerur, Jinze Liu, Brian C Werner, S Scott Sutton, Srinivas R Sadda, Gerald G Schumann, Bradley D Gelfand, Fred H Gage, Jayakrishna Ambati
Alu retroelements propagate via retrotransposition by hijacking long interspersed nuclear element-1 (L1) reverse transcriptase (RT) and endonuclease activities. Reverse transcription of Alu RNA into complementary DNA (cDNA) is presumed to occur exclusively in the nucleus at the genomic integration site. Whether Alu cDNA is synthesized independently of genomic integration is unknown. Alu RNA promotes retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) death in geographic atrophy, an untreatable type of age-related macular degeneration...
February 9, 2021: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America