A global comparison between nuclear and cytosolic transcriptomes reveals differential compartmentalization of alternative transcript isoforms

Transcriptome analyses have typically disregarded nucleocytoplasmic differences. This approach has ignored some post-transcriptional regulations and their effect on the ultimate protein expression levels. Despite a longstanding interest in the differences between the nuclear and cytosolic transcriptomes, it is only recently that data have become available to study such differences and their associated features on a genome-wide scale. Here, we compared the nuclear and cytosolic transcriptomes of HepG2 and HeLa cells. HepG2 and HeLa cells vary significantly in the differential compartmentalization of their transcript isoforms, indicating that nucleocytoplasmic compartmentalization is a cell-specific characteristic. The differential compartmentalization is manifested at the transcript isoform level instead of the gene level because alternative isoforms of one gene can display different nucleocytoplasmic distributions. The isoforms enriched in the cytosol tend to have more introns and longer introns in their pre-mRNAs. They have more functional RNA folds and unique exons in the 3' regions. These isoforms are more conserved than the isoforms enriched in the nucleus. Surprisingly, the presence of microRNAs does not have a significant impact on the nucleocytoplasmic distribution of their target isoforms. In contrast, nonsense-mediated decay is significantly more associated with the isoforms enriched in the nucleus than those enriched in the cytosol.