Molecular Biology

Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006, just 8 years after their breakthrough discovery of RNA interference (RNAi) as a mechanism that can degrade mRNA in a sequence-specific manner (1).

The term “click chemistry” was coined in 1999 at the 217^th American Chemical Society annual meeting by Karl Barry Sharpless, a renowned chemist and professor in the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research Institute’s California Campus.

In a key review in 2001, Sharpless used the phrase again to describe chemical reactions that are simple and high yielding, wide in scope, create only by-products that can be removed without chromatography, are stereospecific, and can be conducted in easily removable or benign solvents (1).

Exosomes constitute a subtype of extracellular vesicles (EVs) that are released from the cytoplasm of most mammalian cell types. Structurally, they exist as enclosed particles surrounded by a lipid bilayer and appear as round bubbles when viewed under an electron microscope.

First discovered in 1983 by researchers studying transferrin receptors, exosomes are now increasingly recognised as key players in intercellular signalling and are demonstrated to play crucial roles in regulating tumour growth, metastasis, and angiogenesis during cancer development (1, 2).

If you’re new to CRISPR, then you might think of it as a tool to disrupt (knock out) or add (knock-in) sequences or genes of interest to the genome, but in this post, we will introduce you to two newer CRISPR applications that do something rather different.

No matter what area of research you are working in, at some point or another you may need to decipher the function of a completely unknown protein or better understand the mechanisms of a cellular pathway.

There are many ways of going about this, either by interfering at the protein level through the use of small molecule inhibitors or blocking antibodies, the genetic level by altering the gene sequence that encodes your protein of interest, or at the transcriptional level by interfering with the RNA transcript.

This piece looks at CRISPR and RNA interference (RNAi) – two commonly used methods to interrogate gene function – and compares the pros and cons of each approach within a lab research setting.

Our supplier Zymo Research recently launched two brand new NGS kits that are designed for fast, normalisation-free, library preparation for 16S rRNA or ITS rRNA sequencing.