Moore Foundation grantees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have new evidence describing the balancing act our cells perform every day between replicating DNA and turning DNA into RNA.
Although biology classes emphasize how cells divide and multiply, the majority of cells are "quiescent" – they are alive and active, but relatively quiet. Stem cells, cells of the adaptive immune system, and oocytes – eggs that women carry for decades before being activated through fertilization – fall into this category.
In this new study, the Cold Spring Harbor team performed experiments demonstrating for the first time that most cells cannot survive in a quiescent state unless an mechanism called RNA interference (RNAi) is up and running. RNAi induces changes in where and when specific genes are expressed without altering their genetic code.
These findings, reported recently in Science magazine, were led by Robert Martienssen, a Moore Foundation-Howard Hughes Medical Institute Plant Biology Investigator.
"This research may explain the key role that RNAi plays in stem cells, which are quiescent for much of their life; and also in cancer, which, after all, is the stimulation of cells that are normally quiescent to begin dividing and proliferating. That transition, interestingly, is often accompanied by mutations in RNAi," said Martienssen.
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