Delihas N. Discovery and characterization of the first non-coding RNA that regulates gene expression, micF RNA: A historical perspective. World J Biol Chem 2015; 6(4): 272-280 [PMID: 26629310 DOI: 10.4331/wjbc.v6.i4.272]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Nicholas Delihas, Professor Emeritus, Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5222, United States. nicholas.delihas@stonybrook.edu
Research Domain of This Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Article-Type of This Article
Frontier
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Biol Chem. Nov 26, 2015; 6(4): 272-280 Published online Nov 26, 2015. doi: 10.4331/wjbc.v6.i4.272
Discovery and characterization of the first non-coding RNA that regulates gene expression, micF RNA: A historical perspective
Nicholas Delihas
Nicholas Delihas, Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5222, United States
Author contributions: Delihas N initiated and participated in the previous research design, experiments, and data analysis, and wrote the current manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The author declares no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Nicholas Delihas, Professor Emeritus, Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5222, United States. nicholas.delihas@stonybrook.edu
Telephone: +1-631-2869427 Fax: +1-631-6328779
Received: June 11, 2015 Peer-review started: June 11, 2015 First decision: August 25, 2015 Revised: September 5, 2015 Accepted: October 1, 2015 Article in press: October 8, 2015 Published online: November 26, 2015
Core Tip
Core tip: The original discovery and characterization of the first non-coding RNA gene and its transcript was with prokaryotes in the 1980s. At that time the Escherichia coli micF RNA gene was characterized in terms of properties, its promoter region, and activation by environmental stress conditions; and the micF RNA transcript structure as well as the micF RNA/target messenger RNA duplex interaction were elucidated. This occurred over 5 years before the discovery of the first eukaryotic regulatory miRNA, which is not generally recognized. Prokaryotic and eukaryotic non-coding RNAs greatly differ in terms of RNA processing, but the basic principle of an RNA gene locus encoding a regulatory RNA that targets gene expression in trans via RNA/target RNA duplex formation is similar. Thus the concept and discovery of regulatory non-coding RNAs and their functions in messenger RNA inhibition originated with prokaryotes.
