2 Amer­i­can ‘Worm Peo­ple’ Win Nobel for RNA Work.

I don’t remem­ber us dis­cussing RNAi in my biol­o­gy class­es in col­lege, and that was­n’t so long ago. The field has bloomed in recent years though, and just about every issue of Sci­ence and Nature reports new find­ings based on the use of inter­fer­ence RNA to block the action of some spe­cif­ic gene.

The process seems to have evolved as an anti-viral strat­e­gy, in which spe­cial chunks of dou­ble-strand­ed RNA (which is usu­al­ly sin­gle-strand­ed) can block the pro­duc­tion of cer­tain pro­teins. The Prize win­ners, Fire and Mel­lo, showed how this process works in Caenorhab­di­tis ele­gans, a round­worm that is com­mon­ly used in devel­op­men­tal biology. 

It turns out that the same process occurs in plants and ani­mals, and has an impor­tant role reg­u­lat­ing cell growth and death, as well as block­ing viral infections. 

The impli­ca­tions for the dis­cov­ery are wide-rang­ing and remain to be ful­ly worked out.

I’ve tacked an ani­ma­tion from Nature Reviews below the fold illus­trat­ing how this works.

The basic idea of the ani­ma­tion is that a sys­tem of enzymes exist to break RNA into small chunks giv­en a match­ing piece of RNA. That sys­tem of enzymes has become elab­o­rat­ed by evo­lu­tion in dif­fer­ent groups of species. This is a pow­er­ful tech­nique. It shows how quick­ly a good idea can be tak­en up by sci­en­tists when it yields results and offers clear hypotheses.

It hard­ly seems worth men­tion­ing how dis­tant this is from the way that IDol­a­tors envi­sion sci­ence.