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Abstract

Messenger RNAs harboring nonsense codons (or premature translation termination codons [PTCs]) are degraded by a conserved quality-control mechanism known as nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD), which prevents the accumulation of truncated and potentially harmful proteins. In Drosophila melanogaster, degradation of PTC-containing messages is initiated by endonucleolytic cleavage in the vicinity of the nonsense codon. The endonuclease responsible for this cleavage has not been identified. Here, we show that SMG6 is the long sought NMD endonuclease. First, cells expressing an SMG6 protein mutated at catalytic residues fail to degrade PTC-containing messages. Moreover, the SMG6-PIN domain can be replaced with the active PIN domain of an unrelated protein, indicating that its sole function is to provide endonuclease activity for NMD. Unexpectedly, we found that the catalytic activity of SMG6 contributes to the degradation of PTC-containing mRNAs in human cells. Thus, SMG6 is a conserved endonuclease that degrades mRNAs terminating translation prematurely in metazoa.