microRNA: target this

Credit: Courtesy of Janez Plavec" /> Credit: Courtesy of Janez Plavec The paper: A. Grimson, et al., "MicroRNA targeting specificity in mammals: determinants beyond seed pairing," Mol Cell, 27:91-105, 2007. (Cited in 109 papers) The bottom line: Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist David Bartel and colleagues constructed an algorithm to predict miRNA target sites on untranslated

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A. Grimson, et al., "MicroRNA targeting specificity in mammals: determinants beyond seed pairing," Mol Cell, 27:91-105, 2007. (Cited in 109 papers)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist David Bartel and colleagues constructed an algorithm to predict miRNA target sites on untranslated regions (UTRs) of mRNAs, which affects posttranscriptional repression. In addition to seed pairing, which is the alignment of complimentary sequences between mRNAs and miRNAs, and central to microRNA's function, factors that predict where miRNA binds include adenine and urasil-rich sequences, as well as the distance of target sites away from the center of long UTR's.

Prior to this Hot Paper, researchers knew that factors besides seed pairing influenced binding, but Bartel's group considered these other factors in unprecedented detail, according to John Rossi, a molecular geneticist at City of Hope.

Oliver Hobert at Columbia University cautions that there are key experimentally-proven, in vivo exceptions to each of the handful of ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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