Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.
Adv Genet. 2013;83:1-69. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-407675-4.00001-8.
The significance of noncoding RNAs in animal biology is being increasingly recognized. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has an extensive system of short RNAs that includes microRNAs, piRNAs, and endogenous siRNAs, which regulate development, control life span, provide resistance to viruses and transposons, and monitor gene duplications. Progress in our understanding of short RNAs was stimulated by the discovery of RNA interference, a phenomenon of sequence-specific gene silencing induced by exogenous double-stranded RNA, at the turn of the twenty-first century. This chapter provides a broad overview of the exogenous and endogenous RNAi processes in C. elegans and describes recent advances in genetic, genomic, and molecular analyses of nematode's short RNAs and proteins involved in the RNAi-related pathways.
非编码 RNA 在动物生物学中的意义正日益受到重视。线虫秀丽隐杆线虫拥有广泛的短 RNA 系统，包括 microRNAs、piRNAs 和内源性 siRNAs，它们调控发育、控制寿命、提供对病毒和转座子的抗性，并监测基因重复。21 世纪之交，外源双链 RNA 诱导的序列特异性基因沉默现象 RNA 干扰的发现，推动了我们对短 RNA 的理解。本章提供了秀丽隐杆线虫中外源和内源性 RNAi 过程的广泛概述，并描述了线虫短 RNA 及其在 RNAi 相关途径中涉及的蛋白质的遗传、基因组和分子分析的最新进展。
