Fig. 1

Detection of putative long dsRNA structure across transcriptomes. a Transcriptomes of 49 organisms, from yeast to human, were analyzed. Using BLAST, we searched for long highly similar sequences within the same mRNA and pre-mRNA sequence. Reversely oriented sequences (red) are likely to pair and form a long intra-molecular dsRNA structure. As a natural control, we use same-strand tandem duplicated sequences (blue), which are not relevant to the secondary structure. b For example, looking at the pre-mRNA of the human otud7b gene, multiple same-strand (blue) and inverted (red) matches are found, most of these pair together repetitive elements (orange) within introns (thin black line). In contrast, the mRNA molecule shows very few hits, all of them pair tandem sequences within repetitive elements in the 3′ UTR. Green bars represent A-to-I editing events, all of which are located in regions that have an inverted sequence match in the pre-mRNA