MicroRNAs: heralds of the noncoding RNA revolution
- Division of Biology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0349, USA
- Corresponding author: apasquinelli{at}ucsd.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
The last decade of the 20th century witnessed the birth of a scientific revolution, as the first indications of a broad layer of gene regulation by noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) began to take shape. The timely launch of a journal entirely dedicated to RNA research, RNA, thus seems prescient for the explosion of discoveries revolving around ncRNAs that would be made over the next 20 years. Perhaps at the base of the current intense interest in ncRNAs are the small RNAs that serve as guides in RNAi and miRNA silencing pathways. During the 1990's, puzzling observations followed by methodical studies in plants, worms, flies, and mold culminated in the revelation that exogenously supplied ncRNAs could silence the expression of just about any gene of interest through a process aptly named RNA interference (RNAi). Additionally, in 1993 a tiny encoded RNA called lin-4 was reported to use partial base-pairing to repress …
