REF proteins mediate the export of spliced and unspliced mRNAs from the nucleus
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The REF family of evolutionarily conserved heterogeneous ribonucleoprotein (hnRNP)-like proteins consists of one central RNP-type RNA binding domain flanked by Arg-Gly-rich regions of variable length. Members of this protein family bind directly to RNA and the mRNA export factor TAP/Mex67p, and it has been suggested that they facilitate the recruitment of TAP/Mex67p to cellular mRNPs. We show that the variable regions are necessary for binding of REFs to RNA and to TAP. Antibodies specific to REFs prevent their interaction with RNA in vitro. After microinjection into Xenopus oocytes, these antibodies inhibit mRNA nuclear export. This inhibition of export is observed whether or not the mRNAs are generated by splicing. The antibodies do not interfere with pre-mRNA splicing or with the nuclear export of constitutive transport element (CTE)-containing RNAs (directly mediated by TAP), so REF proteins must play a critical role in mRNA nuclear export, acting downstream of splicing and upstream of TAP/Mex67p. We also show that recombinant REFs stimulate directly the export of mRNAs that are otherwise exported inefficiently. Together, our data indicate that REFs are directly implicated in the export of mRNAs from the nucleus. More generally, we show that spliced and unspliced mRNAs use common export factors to reach the cytoplasm.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it