Exploration of mRNA acetylation's impact on gene expression and plant functions, indicating significant developmental roles.
N⁴-acetylcytidine (ac⁴C) is a conserved acetylation modification on messenger RNA (mRNA) recently identified in plants. It is deposited by the N-ACETYLTRANSFERASE FOR CYTIDINE IN RNA (ACYR) protein, which is homologous to mammalian N-ACETYLTRANSFERASE (NAT10) (Wang et al., 2023; Li et al., 2023). Here, we describe the defining features and functional landscape of ACYR-dependent ac⁴C marks, their effects on mRNA expression, stability, splicing, and translation, and their roles in leaf development (Wang et al., 2023), photosynthesis (Zhao et al., 2025; Cai et al., 2025), thermosensory flowering (Wu et al., 2025), and plant defense (Lu et al., 2024). We highlight current methods for ac⁴C profiling and discuss future directions in ac⁴C research.mRNA acetylation occurs in plants.
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Zhao et al. (2026) studied this question.
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