Poster #60: Nikita Gulati

Comparative analysis of reported gene targets and binding regions of Glu-CTC tRNA fragments across human diseases

Nikita Gulati, MS Biology Student¹; Andrey Grigoriev, PhD¹˒² ¹Department of Biology, Rutgers University-Camden, Camden, NJ; ²Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Rutgers University-Camden, Camden, NJ

Recurrent detection of overlapping tRNA-derived fragments (tRFs) across diverse disease conditions supports the emerging view that tRFs may act as regulatory molecules rather than random degradation products. While cases of identical tRFs have been described, their comparative analyses are lacking. tRF-Glu-CTC is one such fragment, repeatedly detected in various pathological conditions. We performed a comparative analysis of tRF-Glu-CTC isoforms, their targets and binding regions reported in 18 disease-associated studies. An 18-nucleotide sequence, TCCCTGGTGGTCTAGTGG, was identified in most (14 out of 18) of these studies despite differences in tRF naming, length and disease context. Reported tRF targets showed consistent binding regions, with reverse complementarity to tRFs. Databases of tRF targets, tatDB and tRFTar, showed general agreement with literature targets, often contained common regions rather than full-length matches. Analysis of target homologs further suggested that related genes may share candidate target sites. Our findings indicate that tRF-Glu-CTC may represent a recurrent candidate regulatory fragment in a broad range of human diseases. Its structural stability, extracellular vesicle association, detection in multiple species and a core sequence shared between related isoforms support its potential bio-logical and translational significance. Our work illustrates how tRF target databases can be leveraged to advance smaller scale tRF studies.