Affiliation:
1. Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 9 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Abstract
Two small temporal RNAs (stRNAs),
lin-4
and
let-7
, control developmental timing in
Caenorhabditis elegans
. We find that these two regulatory RNAs are members of a large class of 21- to 24-nucleotide noncoding RNAs, called microRNAs (miRNAs). We report on 55 previously unknown miRNAs in
C. elegans
. The miRNAs have diverse expression patterns during development: a
let-7
paralog is temporally coexpressed with
let-7
; miRNAs encoded in a single genomic cluster are coexpressed during embryogenesis; and still other miRNAs are expressed constitutively throughout development. Potential orthologs of several of these miRNA genes were identified in
Drosophila
and human genomes. The abundance of these tiny RNAs, their expression patterns, and their evolutionary conservation imply that, as a class, miRNAs have broad regulatory functions in animals.
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Cited by
2721 articles.
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