Visualizing adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing in the Drosophila nervous system

Abstract

Jepson et al reverse-engineered a de novo editing site in the context of an artificial UAG stop codon in Aequorea victoria GFP mRNA, which results in full-length GFP only after splicing and A-to-I editing, thus yielding a fluorescent output dependent on dADAR activity. We used this reporter system to detect biologically relevant spatial and temporal endogenous dADAR activity in the fly nervous system, responsiveness to an autoregulatory feedback loop in which dADAR edits its own transcript to fine-tune enzyme function and inter-individual variation in neuronal dADAR activity.