What History Tells Usrnxiv. Regulation Of Gene Expression By Non-coding Rnas: The Early Steps

摘要

RNA interference has become one of the tools favoured by biologists to ascertain rapidly the function of a gene in cells and organisms. In addition, microRNAs have a natural role in the control of differentiation and development. A "missing continent of regulation" has emerged quite recently. It is characterized by the sophistication of the mechanisms involved, as well as by its numerous connections with regulatory mechanisms operating at other levels: consider for instance the role of small RNAs in the establishment and maintenance of the chromatin state (Grewal and Elgin 2007). The award of the 2006 Nobel Prize to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who demonstrated the role of double-stranded RNAs in genetic interference and their potential utilization to inactivate gene expression (Fire et al 1998), has been at the centre of a controversy (Bots et al 2006): the first observations on post-transcriptional gene silencing - co-suppression - were made in plants at the beginning of the 1990s (Napoli et al 1990; van der Krol et al 1990), but did not attract the attention of biologists before they were reproduced in animals, in Caenorhabditis elegans, emphasizing the separation between animal and plant cell and molecular biology.