Akshay K Vaishnaw, Jared Gollob, Christina Gamba-Vitalo, Renta Hutabarat, Dinah Sah, Rachel Meyers, Tony de Fougerolles, John Maraganore
Fire and Mello initiated the current explosion of interest in RNA interference (RNAi) biology with their seminal work in Caenorhabditis elegans. These observations were closely followed by the demonstration of RNAi in Drosophila melanogaster. However, the full potential of these new discoveries only became clear when Tuschl and colleagues showed that 21-22 bp RNA duplexes with 3" overhangs, termed small interfering (si)RNAs, could reliably execute RNAi in a range of mammalian cells. Soon afterwards, it became clear that many different human cell types had endogenous machinery, the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), which could be harnessed to silence any gene in the genome...
July 8, 2010: Silence