Design and Evaluation of AgoshRNAs with 3′-Terminal HDV Ribozymes to Enhance the Silencing Activity

Since the first application of RNA interference (RNAi) in mammalian cells, the expression of short hairpin RNA (shRNA) molecules for targeted gene silencing has become a benchmark technology. Plasmid and viral vector systems can be used to express shRNA precursor transcripts that are processed by the cellular RNAi pathway to trigger sequence-specific gene knockdown. Intensive RNAi investigations documented that only a small percentage of computationally predicted target sequences can be used for efficient gene silencing, in part because not all shRNA designs are active. Many factors influence the shRNA activity and guidelines for optimal shRNA design have been proposed. We recently described an alternatively processed shRNA molecule termed AgoshRNA with a ~18 base pairs (bp) stem and a 3–5 nucleotides (nt) loop. This molecule is alternatively processed by the Argonaute (Ago) protein into a single guide RNA strand that efficiently induces the RNAi mechanism. The design rules proposed for regular shRNAs do not apply to AgoshRNA molecules and therefore new rules had to be defined. We optimized the AgoshRNA design and managed to create a set of active AgoshRNAs targeted against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In an attempt to enhance the silencing activity of the AgoshRNA molecules, we included the hepatitis delta virus (HDV) ribozyme at the 3′ terminus, which generates a uniform 3′ end instead of a 3′ U-tail of variable length. We evaluated the impact of this 3′-end modification on AgoshRNA processing and its gene silencing activity and we demonstrate that this novel AgoshRNA-HDV design exhibits enhanced antiviral activity.