Comprehensive Analysis of mRNA Methylation Reveals Enrichment in 3 ′ UTRs and Near Stop Codons

Whole transcriptome analysis reveals that one third of human and mouse genes express mRNAs containing methylated adenosines. Fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO) gene, a risk gene for obesity and metabolic abnor-malities, demethylates the modified residues, suggesting a link between RNA methylation and disease. Vertebrate ribosomal RNA (rRNA), transfer RNA (tRNA), messenger RNAs (mRNAs) as well as viral RNAs can be methylated at the N6 position of adenosines to produce N6-methyladenosine (m6A). Although the presence of m6A modi-fications in mRNA has been known for decades and a handful of vertebrate m6A-modified mRNAs have been identified, the ex-tent of m6A modification in mRNAs was unknown. Two recent articles using massively parallel sequencing found that mRNAs from more than one third of human and mouse genes contain m6A.1,2 N6-methyladenosines were found to be enriched nea