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RNA interference

Policing rogue genes

Nature volume 402, pages 128–129 (1999)Cite this article

Life is based on a social contract — genes work for the good of the organism, and they are reproduced. But certain rogue genes, called transposons, wantonly reproduce at the expense of the organism, inserting new copies of themselves all over the genome. Reporting in Cell, Tabara et al.1 and Ketting et al.2 now show that organisms have systems to hold transposons in check. They suggest that one of the clues that organisms use to detect illicit activity is double-stranded RNA, and their results could explain the reason for the mysterious phenomenon of RNA interference.

RNA interference was discovered by Guo and Kemphues3 as a method of inactivating genes in the germ line (the cell lineage that gives rise to offspring) of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. In many systems, introduction of ‘antisense’ RNA — that is, RNA complementary to the ‘sense’ or messenger RNA (mRNA) — interferes with gene function. The antisense RNA was thought to hybridize to the appropriate mRNA transcript and block its translation to protein. But Guo and Kemphues noticed that if they injected sense RNA into C. elegans gonads, it inactivated the targeted gene as efficiently as the antisense RNA, ruling out hybridization to mRNA as the inactivation mechanism.

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Figure 1: Model for how RNA interference could suppress transposon activity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Department of Molecular Biology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 6000 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas, 75390-9148, Texas, USA

    Rueyling Lin & Leon Avery

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  2. Leon Avery
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Correspondence to Rueyling Lin or Leon Avery.

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Lin, R., Avery, L. Policing rogue genes. Nature 402, 128–129 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/45938

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