Silencing Is in the AirNovember 12, 2008Everywhere you look, be it Science or Nature, US Weekly (OK, not quite), silencing by ncRNAs is making headlines. But the targets and mechanisms of this silencing are not always clear. A recent report by Peter Fraser and co-workers at The Babraham Institute (UK) and several other universities and centers in Japan and Europe has […]
Epigenetic Changes in a Hard-to-Treat Childhood CancerNovember 5, 2008A very difficult-to-treat childhood leukemia may benefit from the discovery of a small but potent epigenetic change that launches the cancer but could potentially be reversed relatively easily, preventing cancer-promoting genes from being turned on. Children with the subtype of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) known as MLL-AF4 have a cure rate of just under 50 […]
New Method HITS RNA-Protein Interaction SitesNovember 5, 2008DNA, it has turned out, isn’t all it was wound up to be. In recent years we learned that the molecule of life, the discovery of the 20th century, did not-could not-by itself explain the huge differences in complexity between a human and a worm. Forced to look elsewhere, scientists turned to RNA; however, methodological […]
Two Studies Reveal Proteome-Wide Effects of miRNAsOctober 24, 2008Proving that great minds think alike, two independent research groups have used similar methods to examine the impact of individual miRNAs on the proteome. In a Nature report by Steven Gygi, David Bartel, and co-workers at Harvard Medical School, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers used a quantitative […]
miRNA Silences Transcription of a Neighboring GeneOctober 22, 2008Like a conscientious librarian, miRNA can’t seem to resist saying “Shhhh!” whenever the opportunity arises, whether in post-transcriptional or, as a new study suggests, in transcriptional silencing of genes. Although miRNAs were initially thought to suppress gene expression primarily through translational inhibition, recent evidence suggests additional roles for miRNAs in regulating gene expression in the […]
