6,981 research outputs found
A Boost for the Emerging Field of RNA Nanotechnology: Report on the First International Conference on RNA Nanotechnology
This Nano Focus article highlights recent advances in RNA nanotechnology as presented at the First International Conference of RNA Nanotechnology and Therapeutics, which took place in Cleveland, OH, USA (October 23-25, 2010) (http;//www.eng.uc.edu/nanomedidne/RNA2010/), chaired by Peixuan Guo and co-chaired by David Rueda and Scott Tenenbaum. The conference was the first of its kind to bring together more than 30 invited speakers in the frontier of RNA nanotechnology from France, Sweden, South Korea, China, and throughout the United States to discuss RNA nanotechnology and Its applications. It provided a platform for researchers from academia, government, and the pharmaceutical industry to share existing knowledge, vision, technology, and challenges in the field and promoted collaborations among researchers interested in advancing this emerging scientific discipline. The meeting covered a range of topics, including biophysical and single-molecule approaches for characterization of RNA nanostructures; structure studies on RNA nanoparticles by chemical or biochemical approaches, computation, prediction, and modeling of RNA nanoparticle structures; methods for the assembly of RNA nanoparticles; chemistry for RNA synthesis, conjugation, and labeling; and application of RNA nanoparticles in therapeutics. A special invited talk on the well-established principles of DNA nanotechnology was arranged to provide models for RNA nanotechnology. An Administrator from National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI) Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer discussed the current nanocancer research directions and future funding opportunities at NCl. As indicated by the feedback received from the invited speakers and the meeting participants, this meeting was extremely successful, exciting, and informative, covering many groundbreaking findings, pioneering ideas, and novel discoveries
The RNAmute web server for the mutational analysis of RNA secondary structures
RNA mutational analysis at the secondary-structure level can be useful to a wide-range of biological applications. It can be used to predict an optimal site for performing a nucleotide mutation at the single molecular level, as well as to analyze basic phenomena at the systems level. For the former, as more sequence modification experiments are performed that include site-directed mutagenesis to find and explore functional motifs in RNAs, a pre-processing step that helps guide in planning the experiment becomes vital. For the latter, mutations are generally accepted as a central mechanism by which evolution occurs, and mutational analysis relating to structure should gain a better understanding of system functionality and evolution. In the past several years, the program RNAmute that is structure based and relies on RNA secondary-structure prediction has been developed for assisting in RNA mutational analysis. It has been extended from single-point mutations to treat multiple-point mutations efficiently by initially calculating all suboptimal solutions, after which only the mutations that stabilize the suboptimal solutions and destabilize the optimal one are considered as candidates for being deleterious. The RNAmute web server for mutational analysis is available at http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~xrnamute/XRNAmute
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Insights into RNA design from novel molecular tools
RNA, previously recognized merely as a messenger of genetic information, has been recently rediscovered as a versatile molecule with a central role in cellular regulation. These regulatory functions are enabled by its specific chemical makeup that allows it to fold into intricate and flexible structures. In stark contrast with DNA, RNA forms a variety of structural motifs that serve as efficient points of contact in molecular recognition. It is therefore clear, that dynamic RNA structures dictate the binding availability of interfaces that play important roles in molecular regulation inside living cells. As such, the need for tools that can accurately capture and predict RNA structure in vivo continues to be essential to understand RNA function. To this end, my dissertation focuses on the development of molecular tools to predict and characterize accessible RNA interfaces in their native environment. First, I established the usefulness of a fluorescence-based in vivo oligonucleotide hybridization approach to identify accessible interfaces by characterizing numerous RNA regions in several biologically relevant molecules in E. coli. I then described these RNA interactions using a biophysical model based on thermodynamic principles and incorporating large sets of data collected using this fluorescence-based system. This approach displayed improved prediction capabilities of RNA accessibility compared to un-optimized versions without incorporation of in vivo data. Finally, I detailed the development and application of a high throughput tool for the large-scale characterization of accessible interfaces within native RNAs in a single experiment. In this approach, in vivo oligonucleotide hybridization was coupled to transcriptional elongation control to allow analysis via next generation sequencing. This tool was used to obtain complete landscapes of functional structure for 72 regulatory molecules in a single experiment (>1000 regions). Altogether the results of this high throughput approach revealed a pattern indicating that RNA-RNA interaction sites are either highly accessible or highly protected, suggesting their binding status (e.g. actively bound or unbound). In addition, within bacterial small RNAs, our approached revealed the role of the global regulator Hfq as universal structural relaxer. The compendium of these tools provides a unique and fundamental perspective in the study of functional RNA structure, namely, the identification of dynamic structures. Furthermore, the information provided by these approaches significantly aids in the design of synthetic RNAs for a variety of purposes, including gene expression control.Chemical Engineerin
The amazing world of bacterial structured RNAs
The discovery of several new structured non-coding RNAs in bacterial and archaeal genomes and metagenomes raises burning questions about their biological and biochemical functions
3D And 2D RNA Structure Prediction Of The BRCA2 Gene And Its Silencing RNA In The Breast Cancer
Breast cancer is one of the most threatening diseases for women. It is found that BRCA2 gene plays a significant role in breast cancer, provided that mutations occurred. The objective of this study is to determine whether the bioinformatics approach could provide the gene networking, molecular simulation, and computational metabolomics information to shed the relation between BRCA2 gene mutation with breast cancer progression. The methods are utilizing molecular simulation tools to comprehend the biochemical interaction of BRCA2 gene with other oncogenic genes. Lastly, the molecular docking tool is devised to provide the molecular interactions information. It could be implied that the Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD)-based in silico transcriptomics tools could provide the fine-grained information on the exact role of BRCA2 gene in the progression of breast cancer. The clinical impact of this study could only be measured after the wet laboratory experiment is conducted to validate the computational approach result
3D And 2D RNA Structure Prediction Of The BRCA2 Gene And Its Silencing RNA In The Breast Cancer
Breast cancer is one of the most threatening diseases for women. It is found that BRCA2 gene plays a significant role in breast cancer, provided that mutations occurred. The objective of this study is to determine whether the bioinformatics approach could provide the gene networking, molecular simulation, and computational metabolomics information to shed the relation between BRCA2 gene mutation with breast cancer progression. The methods are utilizing molecular simulation tools to comprehend the biochemical interaction of BRCA2 gene with other oncogenic genes. Lastly, the molecular docking tool is devised to provide the molecular interactions information. It could be implied that the Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD)-based in silico transcriptomics tools could provide the fine-grained information on the exact role of BRCA2 gene in the progression of breast cancer. The clinical impact of this study could only be measured after the wet laboratory experiment is conducted to validate the computational approach result
Viroid Intercellular Trafficking: RNA Motifs, Cellular Factors and Broad Impacts
Viroids are noncoding RNAs that infect plants. In order to establish systemic infection, these RNAs must traffic from an initially infected host cell into neighboring cells and ultimately throughout a whole plant. Recent studies have identified structural motifs in a viroid that are required for trafficking, enabling further studies on the mechanisms of their function. Some cellular proteins interact with viroids in vivo and may play a role in viroid trafficking, which can now be directly tested by using a virus-induced gene silencing system that functions efficiently in plant species from which these factors were identified. This review discusses these recent advances, unanswered questions and the use of viroid infection as an highly productive model to elucidate mechanisms of RNA trafficking that is of broad biological significance
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