The impact of post-transcriptional regulation in the p53 network

Freeman, Justin A.
Espinosa, Joaquin M.

Corresponding author. Joaquin M. Espinosa, HHMI - University of Colorado at Boulder, 347 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309. Tel: 303 735 6610; E-mail: [email protected]

Justin A. Freeman completed undergraduate degrees in Information Systems from The University of Texas at Austin and in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He currently performs bioinformatics analysis in support of a wide range of high-throughput experiments.

Joaquin M. Espinosa is an associate professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an HHMI Early Career Scientist. His research focuses on the regulation of gene networks in the context of cancer biology.

Briefings in Functional Genomics and Proteomics 12(1):p 46-57, January 2013. | DOI: 10.1093/bfgp/els058

The p53 transcription factor regulates the synthesis of mRNAs encoding proteins involved in diverse cellular stress responses such as cell-cycle arrest, apoptosis, autophagy and senescence. In this review, we discuss how these mRNAs are concurrently regulated at the post-transcriptional level by microRNAs (miRNAs) and RNA-binding proteins (RBPs), which consequently modify the p53 transcriptional program in a cell type- and stimulus-specific manner. We also discuss the action of specific miRNAs and RBPs that are direct transcriptional targets of p53 and how they act coordinately with protein-coding p53 target genes to orchestrate p53-dependent cellular responses.