Decaying RNA molecules tell a story
Friday, June 5, 2015 - 03:30
in Biology & Nature
The enzyme that degrades messenger RNA follows the ribosomes and stops every 3 nucleotides. Once messenger RNA (mRNA) has done its job - conveying the information to produce the proteins necessary for a cell to function - it is no longer required and is degraded. Scientists have long thought that the decay started after translation was complete and that decaying RNA molecules provided little biological information.