© 2003 by Oxford University Press
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 95, No. 7, 500-502,
April 2, 2003
© 2003 Oxford University Press
NEWS |
Better Blocker: RNA Interference Dazzles Research Community
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
RNA interference (RNAi), dubbed the "breakthrough of the year" for 2002 by the journal Science, is "the most exciting insight in biology in the past decade or two," said Nobel Prize winner Phillip Sharp, Ph.D., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Hundreds of academic laboratories have eagerly adopted RNAi as the answer to their gene knockout problems. And the scientists who performed the pioneering RNAi mechanistic studies could very well be in line for their own Nobel Prize.
The buzz over RNAi stems from the almost mystical ability of double-stranded RNA to efficiently and potently silence any gene in plants, worms, fruit flies, or (most recently) mice. In 2001, a group led by Tom Tuschl, Ph.D., at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, demonstrated that very short interfering RNAs, or "siRNAs," could silence genes containing complementary sequences in human cells. This discovery instantly made RNAi-based gene silencing practical
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