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Gene regulation

Expression and silencing coupled

Nature volume 435, pages 1174–1175 (2005)Cite this article

The RNA interference pathway can inhibit the expression of specific genes. It now seems that an essential component of the silencing process is the gene-expression machinery itself.

Molecular biologists have been amazed in recent years by the discovery of an RNA-mediated mechanism for inhibiting the expression of specific genes — the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway. The ‘RNA-induced silencing complex’ (RISC) contains small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) whose sequence of nucleotide bases can pair with that of a particular messenger RNA, targeting this mRNA for destruction before it can be translated into protein1. However, in many organisms this ‘post-transcriptional’ gene silencing is only part of the story: production of the mRNA can be shut off by a second siRNA complex called RITS (for ‘RNA-induced transcriptional silencing’).

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Figure 1: Transcription-coupled RNA interference.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology,

    Stephen Buratowski & Danesh Moazed

  2. Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School, 240 Longwood Avenue, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA

    Stephen Buratowski & Danesh Moazed

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  1. Stephen Buratowski
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  2. Danesh Moazed
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Buratowski, S., Moazed, D. Expression and silencing coupled. Nature 435, 1174–1175 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/4351174b

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