WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, VOSSMAN
Although previous work identified isolated examples of circular forms of RNA, a new study in PLoS ONE shows that the molecule assumes this shape much more than previously thought. By surveying the full RNA complement of several human cell types for alternative splice variants, researchers at Stanford University identified a significant portion of these are not linear, but circular.
“It’s the global approach” that’s so novel, said Jørgen Kjems, an RNA biochemist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who was not involved in the study. Kjems’s own work on RNA identified a circular antisense RNA transcript of a neuronal gene, targeted by microRNAs and involved in protein suppression.
Rather than examine splice variants for specific genes, the Stanford researchers were using RNA to scan the genome ...
