Gene Technology

Abstract

Novel Nuclear Biology of Small Non-Coding RNAs

Ida-Liisa Kolari, Pia Laitinen, Mikko P. Turunen and Seppo Ylä-Herttuala

When ENCODE project was recently published it became evident that there is unexpectedly large amount of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) in mammalian cells and these findings have boosted a wide interest in the role of ncRNAs in both basic cellular processes and their functions in pathological conditions. The first big boom in ncRNA research was fueled by findings of Fire and Mello after they had found RNA interference (RNAi), which discovery was awarded Nobel prize in 2006. Small interfering RNAs (siRNA) and microRNAs (miRNAs) have since been developed both as important tools for molecular biology research and also as therapeutics for gene therapy applications. These ncRNAs have been thought to function mostly in cytoplasm of target cells mediating post transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS). However, Morris et al.