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RNA interference-based functional genomics in cancer research – an introduction

Oncogene volume 23, pages 8334–8335 (2004)Cite this article

Advances in biology are strongly influenced by developments in the technology available to researchers. In the past, these technological breakthroughs often came from other scientific disciplines. For example, the development of the microscope followed on from improvements in optics during the 17th century and enabled the discovery of cells by Robert Hooke. More recently, major new methodological advances have often come from within biology itself, such as the foundation of recombinant DNA technology based on the discovery of restriction enzymes. In the past few years, another discovery in basic biology has shown the potential to provide a technological revolution in the way that biological research is conducted. This is the discovery of gene silencing by RNA interference, first elucidated by Fire and Mello in the nematode worm in 1998.

RNA interference is a natural mechanism whereby metazoan cells suppress the expression of genes when they come across double-stranded RNA molecules of the same sequence. It probably evolved to combat viruses and rogue genetic elements that utilize double-stranded RNA during their lifecycle. It is an ancient mechanism, found across the animal and plant kingdoms, and in mammals has been supplemented by other, more recent, defence systems. The discovery of RNA interference has led to the important conceptual realization that RNA molecules can have a major impact on the regulation of gene expression beyond their two previously recognized roles as genetic information intermediates (messenger RNA) and structural components in the protein expression machinery (ribosomal and transfer RNAs).

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  1. Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, 44 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3PX, UK

    Julian Downward

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Downward, J. RNA interference-based functional genomics in cancer research – an introduction. Oncogene 23, 8334–8335 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.onc.1208121

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