MicroRNAs—snippets of nucleic acids a couple dozen base pairs in length—are so small that they went unnoticed for decades despite wielding enormous influence in our cells. It’s now known that they suppress the expression of thousands of genes through a process called RNA interference, in which they bind to messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and prevent their translation. But a study published November 9 in ACS Central Science finds that microRNAs (miRNAs) can also amplify gene expression.
“It changes the landscape of microRNA,” Lara Mahal, a chemist at the University of Alberta in Canada tells The Scientist. “There isn’t one mode of microRNA regulation: There are two.”
This isn’t the first time that miRNAs were found to enhance gene expression. A paper published in Science in 2007 pointed to cases of miRNA-mediated upregulation in cells that had stopped dividing. Still, since then, upregulation was thought to be rare and limited to idle ...
