A career in (mRNA) decay
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Life Sciences Centre, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z3
- Corresponding author: george.mackie{at}ubc.ca
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
My entry into the RNA world began in 1967 when a visiting lecturer at the University of Toronto, the late Dr. Gordon Tener, inspired my interest in RNA. Various aspects of RNA biology, from ribosomes to plant viruses, occupied my attention during the early stages of my career. It was only sometime later that I became fascinated by mRNA turnover in bacteria as it represented an intellectual challenge and a research opportunity.
My subsequent path as a graduate student at Cornell with David Wilson allowed me to witness early developments in mRNA decay in Escherichia coli without participating directly. The methodology of the era, pulse-labeling and DNA-RNA hybridization, showed that mRNAs in E. coli were typically short-lived with average half-lives of about 2 min. Moreover, it was widely believed that degradation of an mRNA began even before its transcription was completed. Curiously the direction of degradation, 5′ to 3′ or …
