Of seeds and supplements: structural insights into extended micro RNA –target pairing
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Marc R. Fabian
- Source
- The EMBO Journal. 38
- Subject
- chemistry.chemical_classification
0303 health sciences
General Immunology and Microbiology
General Neuroscience
RNA
Computational biology
Argonaute
Biology
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
chemistry
Pairing
microRNA
Gene silencing
Nucleotide
Molecular Biology
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
030304 developmental biology
- Language
- ISSN
- 1460-2075
0261-4189
Metazoan micro(mi) RNAs guide Argonaute proteins to their targets via perfect pairing to the seed region, located near the 5' end of the miRNA. In this issue of The EMBO Journal, Sheu-Gruttadauria et al report the crystal structure of human Argonaute 2 in complex with both a miRNA and target RNA and show that miRNA 3' supplementary nucleotides can increase target affinity and may contribute more to miRNA-mediated silencing than is currently appreciated.