1 ABSTRACT There are many structures, suborganelles and bodies in the eukaryotic cell nucleus. These domains provide the nucleus with many specific functions. Nucleolus is specialized compartment serves to ribosomes assembly, nuclear speckles or Splicing Factors Compartment play an important role in RNA processing and best studied of them, Cajal bodies (CBs), are involved in snRNP maturation. However, non-membrane substructures are not unique for cell nucleus; processing bodies (P bodies) found in the cytoplasm are proposed to be important places in mRNA degradation pathway. This work is a compilation of four projects focused on non-membrane cellular bodies; namely, nuclear CBs and cytoplasmic P bodies. Both CBs and P bodies are dynamic structures that continuously exchange their components with surrounding environment. In addition to a widely accepted role of CBs in snRNP biogenesis, we show that the CB serves as a place where snRNPs are regenerated after each round of splicing. Thus, CBs are important nuclear compartment involved in snRNP recycling. To further characterize tri-snRNP assembly in CBs we applied kinetic experiments combined with mathematical modeling and created a kinetic model of tri- snRNP formation in the CB that determined kinetic parameters of tri-snRNP formation. Moreover, our kinetic...

Eukaryotic genes contain non-coding sequences - introns that are removed during pre-mRNA splicing by the spliceosome. The spliceosome is composed of five snRNPs (U1, U2, U4/U6 and U5) which assemble on pre-mRNA in a step-wise manner and together with additional non-snRNP proteins catalyse splicing. Mutations in splicing factors can cause severe diseases, for example a point missense mutation (called AD29) in hPrp31 (U4/U6 snRNP specific protein) induces retinitis pigmentosa, disease often leading to complete blindness. In this PhD thesis we show that the hPrp31 AD29 mutant is unstable and is not properly incorporated into spliceosomal snRNPs. In addition, the expression of the mutant protein reduces cell proliferation, which indicates that it interferes with cellular metabolism (likely splicing) and could explain the induction of retinitis pigmentosa. Next, we focus on a role of nuclear environment in pre-mRNA splicing. It was shown that new U4/U6·U5 snRNPs are preferentially assembled in non-membrane nuclear structure - Cajal body. Here we expand this finding and provide evidence that Cajal bodies are also important for U4/U6·U5 snRNP recycling after splicing. In addition, we analyzed a role of chromatin and particularly histone acetylation modulates in splicing regulation. Using inhibitor of...