Twenty years: a very short sequence in the RNA world
- Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-5650, USA
- Corresponding author: bbass{at}biochem.utah.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Lucky for me, my scientific career has encompassed the entire “official” history of the RNA journal and the RNA Society: ribozymes to miRNAs to lncRNAs; Northern blots to PCR to deep sequencing; nuclease structure probing to crystallography to cryo-electron microscopy. Of course, I wasn't there at the very beginning—the RNA world rumbled for quite a while before the Society erupted.
At the time, some of the RNA world's rumblings were hard to understand. Why were mutations that affected the function of the ribosome in the RNA, not the protein? What!?—You think you can predict the stability of an RNA stem just by adding the free energies of nearest neighbor base pairs? Why was messenger RNA missing sequences that existed in the DNA encoding it? What ARE all of those small nuclear RNAs? You're telling me it does that without protein! Whoa, RNA-RNA base pairing between those snRNAs and mRNA is …
