Nonsense shielding: protecting RNA from decay leads to cancer

Abstract

© 2019 The Authors Despite intense scrutiny, the signals that determine whether a given RNA is degraded by the highly conserved and selective nonsense-mediated RNA decay (NMD) pathway remain murky. In this issue of The EMBO Journal, Kishor et al shed light on this issue by demonstrating that the RNA-binding protein, hnRNP L, protects a subset of RNAs from degradation by NMD. This mechanism is responsible for stabilizing the mRNA encoding the pro-survival “oncogenic” protein, BCL-2, in B-cell lymphoma.