Literature Highlights
I’ll dig more into these later, but here are two more papers that have particularly caught my eye this week, and which I intend to read in further depth:
- In vitro reconstitution of the human RISC-loading complex (Open access!)
- These authors have been able to form the RISC-loading complex, which is sufficient to cleave precursor microRNA and loads the miRNA onto Ago2. The entire complex is composed of Dicer, TRBP, and Ago2, without other Ago2-associated proteins that one would find in vivo.
- Intranuclear Distribution and Local Dynamics of RNA Polymerase II during Transcription Activation
- A lot of what we know about transcription and gene regulation in eukaryotes has been from reconstituted in vitro reactions, similar to ones described in the previous paper above. The problem is that the nucleus isn’t homogeneous; there’s all sorts of stuff in there, and people thought that that structure would be key to understanding gene regulation. One idea about gene expression was the “transcriptional factory,” which came initially from the observation that viscosity inside the nucleus is basically like water (meaning that stuff, like DNA, must be packed away to clear space), and that there seemed to be a particular spatial distribution of heterochromatin versus euchromatin in the nucleus. This paper strikes a blow against the whole “transcriptional factory” idea.
