Reflections on the RNA journal at 20 and its role in the question of splice site choice
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095-1662, USA
- Corresponding author: DougB{at}microbio.ucla.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
My first response to hearing that the RNA journal was turning 20 was one of some alarm—how can that much time have gone by and so little progress made? But the task of commemorating this anniversary brings back mostly pleasurable thoughts and of course a lot of progress has been made, just not always in the directions one might have anticipated. My own contribution to RNA Volume 1 was a somewhat florid review of questions regarding how splice sites are chosen for pairing within the spliceosome and some then-recent concepts in the understanding splice site recognition.
The motivation for the 1995 review was to discuss the concept of exon definition recently proposed by Berget. There had been several studies by the Berget, Grabowski, and Reed labs among others that provided experimental support for the idea that exons are recognized as a unit prior to splice site pairing across the intron. …
