ADARs act as potent regulators of circular transcriptome in cancer

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are produced by head-to-tail back-splicing which is mainly facilitated by base-pairing of reverse complementary matches (RCMs) in circRNA flanking introns. Adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADARs) are known to bind double-stranded RNAs for adenosine to inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing. Here we characterize ADARs as potent regulators of circular transcriptome by identifying over a thousand of circRNAs regulated by ADARs in a bidirectional manner through and beyond their editing function. We found that editing can stabilize or destabilize secondary structures formed between RCMs via correcting A:C mismatches to I(G)-C pairs or creating I(G).U wobble pairs, respectively. We provided experimental evidence that editing also favors the binding of RNA-binding proteins such as PTBP1 to regulate back-splicing. These ADARs-regulated circRNAs which are ubiquitously expressed in multiple types of cancers, demonstrate high functional relevance to cancer. Our findings support a hitherto unappreciated bidirectional regulation of circular transcriptome by ADARs and highlights the complexity of cross-talk in RNA processing and its contributions to tumorigenesis. Overall design: We constructed cDNA libraries of 6 circular RNA samples and sequenced the libraries using Illumina Hiseq 4000 platform achieving over 100 millions pairs of mappable reads per sample. Then we examined circular RNA events in EC109 cells after depletion or overexpression of ADAR1 or ADAR2.