RNA surveillance and the exosome
- Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3BH, United Kingdom
- Corresponding author: d.tollervey{at}ed.ac.uk
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
The discoveries that have had the greatest effect on my work over the past 20 years relate to the nuclear RNA surveillance systems, particularly the exosome complex and its cofactors in budding yeast. These insights were made possible, in large part, by technical progress; in the fields of proteomics, genetics, structural biology, high-throughput sequencing, and RNA-protein crosslinking—and this is typical of many recent advances in RNA biology.
The exosome story started from genetic and biochemical analyses of the yeast ribosome synthesis pathway. Prior to 1994, a small number of ribosome synthesis factors had been identified, but detailed functions were known for very few of these, and none of the processing enzymes had been characterized. In 1994, our genetic and biochemical analyses revealed that the endonuclease RNase MRP acts to provide an entry site for the 5′ exonuclease Rat1 (Xrn2), which generates the 5′ end of the 5.8S rRNA. Following on …
