Two degrading decades for RNA
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095-1569, USA
- Corresponding author: guillom{at}chem.ucla.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
The last 20 years have seen an explosion of discoveries in the field of RNA research. Having obtained my PhD working on group II intron self-splicing, and given the mechanistic relationships between these introns and spliceosome-mediated splicing, I feel that one of the most remarkable achievements in the last two decades was the demonstration that RNA catalyzes splicing within the spliceosome, further strenghthening the mechanistic similarities between these splicing systems. After getting my PhD in 1995, one year after the birth of the RNA journal, I focused my interests on the mechanisms of mRNA processing and degradation in eukaryotes, and witnessed in the last 20 years the amazing advances in identifying molecular pathways involved in RNA decay. For many molecular biologists, RNA interference (RNAi) has emerged during this period as the most popular mechanism of RNA degradation, as the discovery of RNAi opened the door to performing genetic loss of …
