The beginning of RNA
- Department of Biology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
- Corresponding author: klb{at}jhu.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
In October 1993, Reinhard Luhrmann organized a small RNA meeting in Marburg, Germany, and invited me as a speaker. This was the same year the Nobel Prize for Splicing was awarded, and many of the meeting talks concerned the mechanism of splicing. I was excited that Joan Steitz, who had first proposed that snRNPs were involved in splicing, was the Keynote Speaker at this conference. She had also recently been named the President-Elect of the newly formed RNA Society. Two interacting low abundance snRNPs, U11 and U12, had been discovered the year before in the Steitz lab, but their function was unknown. My lab had recently discovered that the U11 snRNA binds to a Rous sarcoma virus (RSV) RNA element that helps regulate the balance between spliced and unspliced viral RNA. This was before AT-AC introns were discovered, and U11 and U12 snRNPs were found to substitute for U1 and …
