Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 16 July 2008 | Nature 454, 264 (2008) | doi:10.1038/454264c
News
Mouse miRNA library to open
Biologists launch knockout resource.
Biologists working with 'knockout' mice that have been genetically engineered to inactivate certain genes are creating a library of knockouts of all microRNAs (miRNA) known in mice.
The collection, an initiative of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, is the first to tackle the nearly 500 miRNAs that scientists have identified in the mouse genome.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
This resource should open up some fascinating new science, if we can believe the Phil Sharp hype about function of these small RNAs. Carlo Croce argues that miRNAs play a central role in tumorigenesis, perhaps due to their dysregulation comcomitant with karyotypic chaos or oncodevelopmental ectopic expression during chromatin remodeling in tumorigenesis. Let's hear it for non-coding structural RNA-only genes. Do the gene counters count these as genes? Time will tell.
Estimates that there may be more than a thousand miRNAs may be something of an understatement. The Miranda et al paper in the Sep 22 2006 Cell estimated that the number of miRNAs might be in the tens of thousands! The ENCODE paper last year implies that we have missed a very large number of genes. If the software is as good at finding coding genes as many believe then those missing genes must be mostly noncoding.