RNAi Biology

What's on my desk today? A summary in Nature Reviews Mol Cell Bio of two recent papers describing an alternative miRNA pathway entitled Dispensable Dicer (A. Heinrichs). It's tough--our understanding of RNA biology is growing quickly--but I like to try to keep on top of the biological phenomena that underly what we exploit for our research.

The two papers discussed in the brief highlight:

• Cheloufi, S. et al. (2010) A Dicer-independent miRNA biogenesis pathway that requires Ago catalysis. Nature 465, 584–589.
• Cifuentes, D. et al. (2010) A novel miRNA processing pathway independent of Dicer requires Argonaute2 catalytic activity. Science 6 May 2010 (doi:10.1126/science.1190809).