The Roles of Hydrogen Bonding and Sterics in RNA Interference

摘要

RNA interference (RNAi) has become one of the most important new tools for biological research in the past decade.[1–5]This methodology is used widely for “knocking down”(regulating) expression of specific genes in cell cultures, and it can be carried out conveniently by using synthetic RNA oligonucleotides (short interfering RNAs or siRNAs) that are complementary to a segment of a desired messenger RNA target. When the appropriate doublestranded 21mer RNAs (the sense and antisense strands) are added to a cell culture, they are taken up by the cellular RNAinduced silencing complex (RISC), which presents the separated antisense (“guide”) strand for binding and subsequent cleavage of the target mRNA.[1–5, 6] One of the most useful features of this approach is that the resulting mRNA cleavage occurs with sequence selectivity[7, 8] so that one gene can often be knocked down to low levels of activity with little effect on the rest of cellular gene expression.