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Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 16, 9–10 (1 January 2009) | doi:10.1038/nsmb0109-9

RNA stability: is it the endo' the world as we know it?

Jeffrey Wilusz

A recent series of papers provides important new insights into mechanisms of RNA processing, mRNA decay and quality control. Rrp44, the only component of the yeast exosome with known exonucleolytic activity, and SMG6, a factor in the metazoan nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) pathway, are both shown to have endonuclease activity mediated by a conserved PIN domain.