Towards a complete description of the microRNA complement of animal genomes 英文参考文献.docVIP

Minireview Towards a complete description of the microRNA complement of animal genomes Julius Brennecke and Stephen M Cohen Address: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany. Correspondence: Stephen M Cohen. E-mail: Stephen.Cohen@embl-heidelberg.de Published: 21 August 2003 Genome Biology 2003, 4:228 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2003/4/9/228 ? 2003 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract Recent cloning and computational studies have sought to catalog all the microRNA genes encoded in animal genomes. Here, we highlight recent advances in identifying Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster microRNAs. One of the big surprises of the past few years has been the emergence of microRNAs (miRNAs) as a major new class of regulatory gene products. These small RNA molecules control gene expression by regulating the stability or transla- tion of mRNAs. The growing awareness that there might be quite large numbers of miRNA genes has triggered the use of systematic approaches to define the complete set of miRNAs encoded in animal genomes. Here, we summarize these efforts, highlighting recent papers that estimate the miRNA complement of the Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster genomes. siRNAs and most plant miRNAs [11,12]. Imperfect pairing in the central part of the duplex presumably does not allow cleav- age to occur and instead leads to a block in translation, as shown for the founding members of the miRNA family, lin-4 and let-7 of C. elegans [13-15]. Despite these similarities, miRNAs can be distinguished from siRNAs according to the following four criteria [16]. First, miRNAs are excised from endogenous transcripts that have the ability to locally form stable, primarily double-stranded, hairpin structures of around 70 nucleotides. Second, the ha