We'll always have RNA
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute and National Center for Behavioral Genomics, Department of Biology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02454, USA
- Corresponding author: rosbash{at}brandeis.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
My romance with RNA began in Paris at the age of 21. After four undergraduate years at Caltech and before going to graduate school at MIT, I somehow managed to spend a miraculous year in the city of light, where I worked in the laboratory of Marianne Grunberg-Manago. She had done a post-doc with Severa Ochoa at NYU, where she discovered the enzyme polynucleotide phosphorylase (PNPase). This was thought at the time to be the enzyme that synthesized RNA in bacteria, for which Ochoa was awarded a share of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Given that the physiological role of PNPase is to degrade RNA rather than synthesize it (the enzyme is reversible of course, and Grunberg-Manago and Ochoa studied the reverse reaction), this topic in Marianne's lab presaged my long interest in RNA processing. Marianne was also working on the regulation of bacterial protein synthesis when …
