A week ago I was standing with my wife by the River Tagus in Lisbon, next to the Monument to the Discoveries. The monument is at the spot where Vasco da Gama set out to discover the southeast passage from Europe to Asia, past the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco’s discovery marked the beginning of the Portuguese maritime empire. At the furthest tip of Europe, Portugal was perfectly situated to found su...

To successfully apply RNAi, the very first step is to design functional siRNA or shRNA sequences targeting specific genes. Many characteristics of functional synthetic siRNAs have been identified, but it remains questionable if these characteristics can be equally applied to the design of functional shRNAs. Our three-phase algorithm was developed based on the characteristics of functional siRNA...

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