Catalanotto Caterina, Azzalin Gianluca, Macino Giuseppe, Cogoni Carlo
Dipartimento di Biotecnologie Cellulari ed Ematologia, Sezione di Genetica Molecolare, Università di Roma La Sapienza, 00161 Roma, Italy.
Genes Dev. 2002 Apr 1;16(7):790-5. doi: 10.1101/gad.222402.
Small RNA molecules have been found to be specifically associated with posttranscriptional gene silencing (PTGS) in both plants and animals. Here, we find that small sense and antisense RNAs are also involved in PTGS in Neurospora crassa. The accumulation of these RNA molecules depends on the presence of functional qde-1 and qde-3 genes previously shown to be essential for gene silencing, but does not depend on a functional qde-2, indicating that this gene is involved in a downstream step of the gene silencing pathway. Supporting this idea, a purified QDE2 protein complex was found to contain small RNA molecules, suggesting that QDE2 could be part of a small RNA-directed ribonuclease complex involved in sequence-specific mRNA degradation.
人们发现，小RNA分子在植物和动物中均与转录后基因沉默（PTGS）存在特异性关联。在此，我们发现小正义RNA和反义RNA也参与了粗糙脉孢菌中的PTGS。这些RNA分子的积累依赖于功能性qde-1和qde-3基因的存在，先前研究表明这两个基因对基因沉默至关重要，但不依赖于功能性qde-2，这表明该基因参与基因沉默途径的下游步骤。支持这一观点的是，纯化的QDE2蛋白复合物被发现含有小RNA分子，这表明QDE2可能是参与序列特异性mRNA降解的小RNA导向核糖核酸酶复合物的一部分。
