Review: Non-canonical role of Drosha ribonuclease III.

The typical function of Drosha is participating in cleaving pri-miRNA, the initial step of miRNA biogenesis, in the nucleus. Since Drosha has a double-stranded RNA-binding domain and two RNase III domains, when it binds and/or cleaves other RNA species other than pri-miRNA, Drosha is able to induce a variety of novel biological effects. Moreover, by interacting with other protein, Drosha is able to modify the function of other protein complexes. Recently, diverse non-classical functions of Drosha have been demonstrated, such as promoting DNA damage repair, transcriptional activation and inhibition, pre-mRNA splicing regulation, mRNA destabilization, and virus-host interaction. In this review, we describe these newly discovered functions of Drosha in order to present a panoramic picture of the novel biological processes that Drosha is involved in.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Xuan Jiang reports financial support was provided by The Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. 2021A1515011345). Xuan Jiang reports financial support was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China grants (No. 82271899, No.32200927). Xuan Jiang reports financial support was provided by the Program of Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Systems Medicine in Inflammatory Diseases (No. ZDSYS20220606100803007).
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