Du Tingting, Zamore Phillip D
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA 01605, USA.
Development. 2005 Nov;132(21):4645-52. doi: 10.1242/dev.02070.
Discovered in nematodes in 1993, microRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding RNAs that are related to small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), the small RNAs that guide RNA interference (RNAi). miRNAs sculpt gene expression profiles during plant and animal development. In fact, miRNAs may regulate as many as one-third of human genes. miRNAs are found only in plants and animals, and in the viruses that infect them. miRNAs function very much like siRNAs, but these two types of small RNAs can be distinguished by their distinct pathways for maturation and by the logic by which they regulate gene expression.
微小RNA（miRNA）于1993年在线虫中被发现，是一类与小干扰RNA（siRNA）相关的非编码RNA，siRNA是引导RNA干扰（RNAi）的小RNA。miRNA在植物和动物发育过程中塑造基因表达谱。事实上，miRNA可能调控多达三分之一的人类基因。miRNA仅存在于植物、动物以及感染它们的病毒中。miRNA的功能与siRNA非常相似，但这两种小RNA可通过其不同的成熟途径以及调控基因表达的逻辑来区分。
