What is small RNA gene editing technology?

RNAs are major components of gene silencing and are involved in the mechanism of gene regulation called RNA interference or RNAi. RNAi is a sequence specific mRNA degradation process that regulates gene expression by using the gene’s own DNA sequence of genes to turn a desired expression “off.”

The siRNA (small/short interfering RNA) is a single duplex structure that is 21 nucleotides long and only alters the gene expression if it finds the complementary sequence on the mRNA. When this happens, the Argonaute protein can either cleave the mRNA, destroy it, or recruit accessory factors to regulate the target sequence in other ways.

MicroRNAs (miRNA) are even smaller heteroduplex structures that are highly conserved, noncoding RNA molecules that take the lead in the regulation of important tasks in different critical processes of disease pathogenesis. miRNA binds imperfectly to non-complementary sequences to be able to interfere with the translation processes.

Resources:

G;, Aquino-Jarquin. “Emerging Role of CRISPR/Cas9 Technology for MicroRNAs Editing in Cancer Research.”

Cancer Research, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 5 Dec. 2017, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29208606/.

Thorne, Lucy. “The Best Functional Genomic Screening Method: CRISPR or RNAi?” Biocompare, 30 Apr.

2019, www.biocompare.com/Editorial-Articles/360194-The-Best-Functional-Genomic-Screening-Method-

CRISPR-or-RNAi/.