Metazoan tsRNAs: Biogenesis, Evolution and Regulatory Functions

miRNAs: biogenesis, origin and evolution, functions on virus-host interaction.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small endogenous non-coding functional RNAs. They can play vital roles in post-transcriptional regulating mRNAs transcripts in nearly all biological processes. More and more reports on miRNAs come from different species (animal, plant, bacteria, virus) in the researches in development, immunity, apoptosis, tumor, virus-host interaction. These recent findings provide new i...

Basal Metazoan Sensory Evolution

Cnidarian milestones in metazoan evolution.

Cnidarians display most of the characters considered as milestones of metazoan evolution. Whereas a tissue-level organization was probably already present in the multicellular common ancestor of all animals, the Urmetazoa, the emergence of important animal features such as bilateral symmetry, triploblasty, a polarized nervous system, sense organs (eyes, statocysts), and a (chitinous or calcium-...

Decoding Noncoding Regulatory DNAs in Metazoan Genomes

The recent revelation that the human genome contains only ~30,000 genes underscores the importance of gene regulation in generating organismal diversity. Cis-regulatory DNAs, or enhancers, are short stretches of DNA--300 bp to 1,000 bp in length--that control gene expression. This DNA accounts for a substantial fraction of metazoan genomes, but is largely invisible. It cannot be identified by s...

MicroRNAs: biogenesis and molecular functions.

Small regulatory RNAs are essential and ubiquitous riboregulators that are the key mediators of RNA interference (RNAi). They include microRNAs (miRNAs) and short-interfering RNAs (siRNAs), classes of approximately 22 nucleotide RNAs. miRNAs and siRNAs bind to Argonaute proteins and form effector complexes that regulate gene expression; in animals, this regulation occurs primarily at the post-t...