An RNA mystery and its denouement
- Department of Biomolecular Chemistry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA
- Corresponding author: dabrow{at}wisc.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
My graduate student Regina Vidaver and I published the first article in the second issue of RNA in April 1995. Our paper reported a surprising property of human U6 RNA that provides insight into mechanisms for modulating the stability of RNA–RNA complexes. That article represents the mid-point in my career in RNA science so far. Below I describe what led up to that article, and very briefly consider how things have changed since it was published.
I became a member of the RNA community in 1978, when I joined Harry Noller's research group at UC Santa Cruz as a junior undergraduate. At that time, entry into the Noller lab as an undergrad required satisfactory purification of a restriction enzyme (in my case SmaI) from a frozen wad of bacterial cells in his 182L Biochemistry of Macromolecules lab course. Having passed this hurdle, Harry assigned me the task of identifying contacts …
