Figure 2

Biotin pull-downs identify bone fide miRNA targets. (A) Volcano plot showing the significance of the difference in expression between the miR-17-5p pull-down and the mock-transfected control, for all transcripts expressed in HEK293T cells. Both targets predicted by TargetScan or validated previously via luciferase assay were significantly enriched in the pull-down compared to the controls. (B) Results from luciferase assays on previously untested targets predicted using TargetScan and uncovered using the biotin pull-down. The plot indicates mean luciferase activity from either the empty plasmid or from pMIR containing a miRNA binding site in the 3′ UTR, relative to a negative control. Asterisks indicate a significant reduction in luciferase activity (one-sided t-test; P < 0.05) and error bars the standard error of the mean over three replicates. (C-E) Targets identified through PAR-CLIP or through miRNA over-expression studies show greater enrichment in the pull-down. Cumulative distribution of log fold-change in the pull-down for transcripts identified as targets by the indicated miRNA over-expression study or not. Red, canonical transcripts found to be miR-17-5p targets in the indicated study (Table S5 in Additional file 1); black, all other canonical transcripts; p, one-sided P-value from Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for a difference in distributions. (F) To confirm that our results were dependent on RISC association, cells were transfected with either single or double-stranded synthetic miRNAs, then subjected to AGO2 immunoprecipitation. The biotin pull-down was performed in the AGO2-enriched and AGO2-depleted fractions. (G-H) Quantitative RT-PCR revealed that, with double-stranded (ds) miRNA (G), four out of five known targets were enriched relative to input mRNA (*P ≤ 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001) in the AGO2-enriched but not in the AGO2-depleted fractions, but this enrichment was not seen for the cells transfected with a single-stranded (ss) miRNA (H). The numbers on the x-axis correspond to those in Figure 2F. Error bars represent the standard error of mean (sem).