Living microprocessor tunes in to feedback
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - 03:00
in Biology & Nature
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) – tiny strands of non-protein-coding RNAs – start off as long strands of precursor miRNAs. These long strands get chopped up by a special kind of machinery, the "Microprocessor" complex, to transform them into their shorter functional form. The resulting miRNAs bind to messenger RNA (mRNAs) molecules, inhibiting their protein production capacity and thus regulating the levels of hundreds of different proteins.