Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology
Volume 2009, Article ID 594678, 6 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2009/594678
MicroRNA-Biogenesis and Pre-mRNA Splicing Crosstalk
1Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel
2Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
Received 27 March 2009; Accepted 18 May 2009
Academic Editor: Zhumur Ghosh
Copyright © 2009 Noam Shomron and Carmit Levy. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are often hosted in introns of protein-coding genes. Given that the same transcriptional unit can potentially give rise to both miRNA and mRNA transcripts raises the intriguing question of the level of interaction between these processes. Recent studies from transcription, pre-mRNA splicing, and miRNA-processing perspectives have investigated these relationships and yielded interesting, yet somewhat controversial findings. Here we discuss major studies in the field.