Abstract Glucocorticoids (GCs) are one of the most used anti-inflammatory drugs worldwide. Despite their widespread use, our understanding of their post-transcriptional effects remains poorly understood. The tristetraprolin (TTP) RNA binding protein (RBP) family (ZFP36, ZFP36L1 and ZFP36L2) has been implicated in inflammation regulation via binding to AU-rich elements (ARE) in mRNAs, with TTP being implicated in GC modulation. We hypothesised that ZFP36L1 and ZFP36L2 are part of the GC pathway and tested this hypothesis in bronchial epithelium, which commonly encounters GC in vivo upon inhalation. Our data show that dexamethasone, a commonly used GC, modulated the levels, subcellular localisation and RNA binding of ZFP36L1/L2. Employing Frac-seq (subcellular fractionation and RNA-sequencing), we show that GC modulated distinct subsets of RNAs in a subcellular-dependent manner. In addition to their mostly known transcriptional effects (116 differentially expressed genes, DEGs), GCs modified the binding to monosomes of myriad mRNAs (83 differentially bound genes, DBGs). We also demonstrate that ZFP36L1/L2 modulated gene expression mainly at the total cytoplasmic and polyribosome binding levels. ZFP36L1/L2 down-regulation led to an increase in ARE-containing mRNAs and a pronounced modification of the effects of GC on gene expression. We observed a small overlap of genes modulated by GCs when comparing control and ZFP36L1/L2 knockdown cells, in a subcellular-dependent manner Our data also suggest a novel role for these RBPs and GCs in epithelial biology via regulation of mRNAs encoding proteins important for epithelial cell function including cellular structure. We believe that our data has further implications in how we investigate gene expression. We show the power of employing sub-cellular fractionation when analysing genome-wide effects for known ‘transcriptional modulators’ such as GCs, as well as a tool to demonstrate the extent of the effect of RBPs on gene expression modulation beyond total RNA levels.

The RNA binding proteins ZFP36L1 and ZFP36L2 modulate transcriptional and post-transcriptional genome-wide effects of glucocorticoids