Making sense of antisense
Out in the San Joaquin Valley of California grows a field of tomato plants that look like ordinary tomato plants. But these tomatoes are special - one of the first fruits of a new technology that may revolutionize not just commercial plant development but human medicine as well. The new technology uses novel RNAs, called antisense RNAs, to block the activity of specific genes. At first, researchers were mainly interested in antisense RNA as a tool for probing gene function. In the late 1970s, when the technology was first developed, molecular biologists didn't have a good way of mutating genes in the cells of higher organisms so that they could see what happens when the gene activity is lost. Antisense technology, in effect, provided a way of doing that. But the biotechnology industry soon recognized the immense practical potential of a technique that could be used to knock out the activity of bad genes. To make the tomato plants, for example, plant scientists used antisense RNAs to shut off the expression of the gene encoding an enzyme that makes tomatoes mushy, thereby yielding a product that may travel better and last longer on grocery shelves. Recent work by various labs suggests that it may be possible to design antisense compounds that inhibit the activity of viral genes or of the oncogenes thought to contribute to cancer development, without affecting normal cellular genes. That raises the possibility that the technology might aid in producing better, more selective drugs to treat viral diseases, including AIDS, and cancer.
- OSTI ID:
- 5826893
- Journal Information:
- Science (Washington, D.C.); (United States), Vol. 253:5019; ISSN 0036-8075
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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