WIREs
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In vitro systems have provided a wealth of information in the field of RNA biology, as they constitute a superior and sometimes the unique approach to address many important questions. Such cell‐free methods can be sorted by the degree of complexity of the preparation of enzymatic and/or regulatory activity. Progress in the study of pre‐mRNA processing has largely relied on traditional in vitro methods, as these reactions have been recapitulated in cell‐free systems. The pre‐mRNA capping, editing, and cleavage/polyadenylation reactions have even been reconstituted using purified components, and the enzymes responsible for catalysis have been characterized by such techniques. In vitro splicing using nuclear or cytoplasmic extracts has yielded clues on spliceosome assembly, kinetics, and mechanisms of splicing and has been essential to elucidate the function of splicing factors.
RNA biology in a test tube—an overview of in vitro systems/assays
Synthetic Nucleic Acids: Beyond DNA and RNA | Bio 2.0 | Learn Science at Scitable
Synthetic biology is such a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary field that it seems like every new paper sends me into a new area of science that I hadn't considered before. The latest issue of Science features a paper 1 on synthetic nucleic acids, completely new molecules capable of information storage just like DNA and RNA, dubbed xeno-nucleic acids, or XNAs. There are lots of reasons to understand the limits of biological-or chemical-information storage. It is truly wondrous that the phenomenon exists at all; our genome is quite an awe-inspiring 46-molecule collection (for each chromosome is, at heart, an enormously long but unbroken molecule of DNA). All life, at least as we know it, uses DNA or RNA for storing and retrieving genetic information. We know for certain that DNA was not the first information storage molecule, since DNA is completely reliant on a protein copying mechanism that is far too complicated to have been present at the origin of life.David H Bechhofer Professor David H Bechhofer joined Mount Sinai in 1986, after receiving his PhD from Columbia University in 1984 and doing postdoctoral work at the Public Health Research Institute of New York (moved since to UMDNJ in Newark, NJ). He is now Professor of Medical Education, and Professor of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics. His laboratory has been funded by the NIH since 1987, and he has served several times on the NIH Microbial Genetics Study Section as an ad hoc reviewer. Professor Bechhofer’s current research interests focus on Prokaryotic mRNA decay and stable RNA processing. In particular he and his team study the mechanism of mRNA decay in the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis.
Early View - WIREs RNA