Mining the TranscriptomeApril 17, 2009As the herculean genome sequencing efforts closed in on a draft of the human genome sequence back in 2000, the estimated numbers of “genes” that comprised our genome dropped quicker than the market cap of the biotech heavy Nasdaq after Clinton/Blair announced the sequences of these little gems would reside in the public domain. Shortly […]
Huh? miR-96 Tied to Hearing LossApril 17, 2009Over the years, mothers around the world have routinely warned their children of the imminent hearing loss resulting from too many Iron Maiden concerts, blasting Winger too loud on car stereos, or the permanently attached iPod earbuds that come standard with adolescents nowadays, but now we have scientific data to suggest our mothers and miR-96 […]
miRNA Promoter Elements Driving Cell-Specific ExpressionApril 10, 2009Whether you’re talking about real estate or miRNA expression, the phrase “location, location, location” expresses the undeniable importance of surroundings. Like protein-coding genes, miRNA genes can be turned on or off depending on the cellular context. However, mechanisms responsible for cell-specific miRNA expression are largely unknown because miRNA promoters are not as well characterized as […]
Promoter Targeted Small RNAs Lay a Big Smack Down on Gene Expression.March 31, 2009Sometimes to get the correct result, a researcher needs to knock a gene down. Not just a little knockdown, but like a Mike Tyson knockdown! (well, at least back in the days before the whole ear-biting thing.) Some clever scientists at The Scripps Research Institute may have found a way to do just that. By […]
RNAi Rescues DNA Methylation DefectsMarch 25, 2009Nowadays it seems like “interference” carries such negative connotations. RNAs aren’t really big meddlers. In fact, it’s RNAi that’s protecting genomes against the transgenerational loss of DNA methylation. A team of researchers in France and Spain has demonstrated that in Arabidopsis, the RNA interference (RNAi) machinery can remethylate target sequences that were hypomethylated by mutation […]
miR-101: RNA Guardian Of The Genome?March 9, 2009MicroRNA-101 (miR-101) is rapidly earning a place in the “Who’s Who” of tumor suppressor genes. In November, we told you how The Little RNA that Could wallops prostate cancer by repressing the histone methyltransferase EZH2. Now researchers at the University of Southern California have shown that miR-101 plays a similar role in the suppression of […]
ESC Pluripotency Players Take To RESTMarch 2, 2009The lab gloves came off in a recent Nature exchange on the putative role of the transcriptional repressor, REST, in embryonic stem cell pluripotency. In the left corner, Singh and colleagues, conducting experiments out of MD Anderson in the Lone Star State, published data in Nature back in May, 2008 indicating that REST may control […]
miRNA Regulation Checks and Balances in Organ AdhesionFebruary 23, 2009We’re all asking ourselves these days, “But who regulates the regulators?” For miRNA, the answer may just be a consortium of genes both living and dead. A group of Toronto researchers exogenously expressed versican 3’UTR (a potential target for miR-199a*) hooked up to a reporter construct. While expression of the luciferase or GFP reporter was […]
HITS-CLIP Cracks The FOX2 Splicing CodeFebruary 23, 2009As crafty as its animal namesake, the cell-type-specific RNA splicing regulator FOX2 slips in and out of the transcriptome, causing the inclusion of one exon here or the exclusion of another there, with no apparent rhyme or reason. However, researchers at the Salk Institute and the University of California, San Diego recently outsmarted FOX2 by […]
miRNAs Adding Restraint to Alu DuplicationFebruary 17, 2009February 17th, 2009. Even in evolution there can be too much of a good thing. What if a transposon broke free and replicated whenever it wanted to, and integrated wherever it wanted to, unchecked? How long would the host be around? Such may have happened to Alu repeats in primates about 40 million years ago. […]