Researchers find mechanism underlying alt. splicing of premessenger RNA into messenger RNA

Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - 18:14 in Biology & Nature

An international research team led by Tim Nilsen, Ph.D., a professor of medicine and biochemistry and the director of the School of Medicine's Center for RNA Molecular Biology, has discovered an unexpected mechanism governing alternative splicing, the process by which single genes produce different proteins in different situations. The new mechanism suggests that curing the more than half of genetic diseases that are caused by mutations in the genetic code that in turn create mistakes in alternative splicing may be considerably more complicated than biomedical researchers have previously assumed. Those diseases include a large number of cancers and many neurodegenerative diseases.

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