Structural Analysis of Interactions Between Airborne Pollutants and Chemically Modified RNAs

Polluted air is a global threat for biodiversity and human health. The air pollution has two different possibilities to affect functionality of biological systems: directly and indirectly. The first is based on direct inhalation of polluted air, and the second is due to fall out of pollutants in water and soil during weather events as rain or snow. The availability of new experimental molecular techniques allows to deeply analyze the effect of specific chemicals on molecular mechanisms. The effects on DNA have long been known, conversely only more recently the attention has been focused on mechanisms involving the RNAs. This paper proposes the possibility that an airborne chemical pollutant could directly influence the naturally chemically modified RNAs (N6-methyadenosine) that are involved in epi-transcriptomics regulation. In this paper, we investigated, at structural genomics level, the interaction between selected hazardous air pollutants and RNAs carrying a N6-methyladenosine.