Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

tRNA fragments in mosquitos may play role in spreading disease

tRNA fragments—small sections of transfer RNA molecules—have recently been discovered to play active roles in the biology of diverse organisms. Now, these tRNA fragments (tRFs) have been found to have important functions ...

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

A drug to treat retinal diseases with drops instead of injections

The Spanish firm Sylentis has developed a compound to treat diseases of the retina including age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. The treatment is administered by ophthalmic drops instead of intraocular ...

Oncology & Cancer

Acid reflux cancer link

Esophageal adenocarcinoma (EA) is an increasingly common cancer that silently affects the esophagus – the muscular tube that moves food into stomach. What causes EA is not well known but gastroesophageal reflux disease ...

page 1 from 4

Small interfering RNA

Small interfering RNA (siRNA), sometimes known as short interfering RNA or silencing RNA, is a class of double-stranded RNA molecules, 20-25 nucleotides in length, that play a variety of roles in biology. Most notably, siRNA is involved in the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway, where it interferes with the expression of a specific gene. In addition to their role in the RNAi pathway, siRNAs also act in RNAi-related pathways, e.g., as an antiviral mechanism or in shaping the chromatin structure of a genome; the complexity of these pathways is only now being elucidated.

SiRNAs were first discovered by David Baulcombe's group at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, England, as part of post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS) in plants. The group published their findings in Science in a paper titled "A species of small antisense RNA in posttranscriptional gene silencing in plants". Shortly thereafter, in 2001, synthetic siRNAs were shown to be able to induce RNAi in mammalian cells by Thomas Tuschl and colleagues in a paper published in Nature. This discovery led to a surge in interest in harnessing RNAi for biomedical research and drug development.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA