Until now it was held that miRNAs—noncoding snippets of RNA, only a few nucleotides long—work exclusively by suppressing protein expression in dividing cells, including cancer cells. A study published in ACS Central Science, overhauls this notion, and shows some miRNAs can boost protein expression as well.
“Our study upends common assumptions on how miRNAs work. Right now, we think of microRNA as down-regulators of protein expression, stemming from their discovery as natural analogs of silencing RNA (siRNA)…There is evidence that upregulation has been seen in other common cancer genes, but was ignored by scientists because it did not fit their expectations,” said senior author of the study, Lara Mahal, PhD, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics and professor of chemistry at the University of Alberta, Canada. “We clearly show miRNAs can directly enhance and repress the expression of proteins in cancer cells.”
