Drug discovery is so very hard because we don’t understand the way cells and organisms work very well. We know some of the actors — DNA, proteins, lipids, enzymes but new ones are being discovered all the time (even among categories known for decades such as microRNAs).
Briefly microRNAs bind to messenger RNAs usually decreasing their stability so less protein is made from them (translated) by the ribosome. It’s more complicated than that (see later), but that’s not bad for a first pass.
Presently some 2,800 human microRNAs have been annotated. Many of them are promiscuous binding more than one type of mRNA. However the following paper more than doubled their number, finding some 3,707 new ones [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 112 pp. E1106 – E1115 ’15 ]. How did they do it?
Simplicity itself. They just looked at samples of ‘short’ RNA sequences from 13 different tissue types. MicroRNAs are all under 30 nucleotides long (although their precursors are not). The reason that so few microRNAs have been found in the past 20 years is that cross-species conservation has been used as a criterion to discover them. The authors abandoned the criterion. How did they know that this stuff just wasn’t transcriptional chaff? Two enzymes (DROSHA, DICER) are involved in microRNA formation from larger precursors, and inhibiting them decreased the abundance of the ‘new’ RNAs, implying that they’d been processed by the enzymes rather than just being runoff from the transcriptional machinery. Further evidence is that of half were found associated with a protein called Argonaute which applies the microRNA to the mRBNA. 92% of the microRNAs were found in 10 or more samples. An incredible 23 billion sequenced reads were performed to find them.
If that isn’t complex enough for you, consider that we now know that microRNAs bind mRNAs everywhere, not just in the 3′ untranslated region (3′ UTR) — introns, exons. MicroRNAs also bind pseudogenes, SINEes, circular RNAs, nonCoding RNAs. So it’s a giant salad bowl of various RNAs binding each other affecting their stability and other functions. This may be echoes of prehistoric life before DNA arrived on the scene.
It’s early times, and the authors estimate that we have some 25,000 microRNAs in our genome — more than the number of protein genes.
As always, the Category “Molecular Biology Survival Guide” found on the left should fill in any gaps you may have.
One rather frightening thought; If, as Dawkins said, we are just large organisms designed to allow DNA to reproduce itself, is all our DNA, proteins, lipids etc, just a large chemical apparatus to allow our RNA to reproduce itself? Perhaps the primitive RNA world from which we are all supposed to have arisen, never left.
Chemiotics II 