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miRNA silencing

A microRNA (miRNA) is a short RNA molecule found in eukaryotic cells. A microRNA molecule has very few nucleotides (an average of 22) compared with other RNAs. miRNAs are post-transcriptional regulators that bind to complementary sequences on target messenger RNA transcripts (mRNAs), usually resulting in translational repression or target degradation and gene silencing.

miRNAs were discovered in 1993 during a study of the gene lin-14 in C. elegans development. As much as 40% of miRNA genes may lie in the introns of protein and non-protein coding genes or even in exons of long nonproteincoding transcripts.

miRNA genes are usually transcribed by RNA polymerase II. The polymerase often binds to a promoter found near the DNA sequence encoding what will become the hairpin loop of the premiRNA. The resulting transcript is capped with a poly(A) tail.

Drosha
Drosha is a Class 2 RNAse IIIenzyme responsible for initiating the processing of miRNA, or short RNA molecules naturally expressed by the cell that regulate a wide variety of other genes by interacting with the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) to induce cleavage of complementary messenger RNA (mRNA) as part of the RNAi pathway.

microRNA molecule is synthesized as a long RNA primary transcript known as a pri-miRNA, which is cleaved by Drosha to produce a characteristic stem-loop structure of about 70bp long, known as a pre-miRNA. Drosha exists as part of a protein complex called the Microprocessor complex, which also contains the double-stranded RNA binding protein Pasha (also called DGCR8)

Dicer
Dicer is an endoribonuclease in the RNase III family that cleaves dsRNA and premicroRNA (miRNA) into short double-stranded RNA fragments called siRNA about 2025 nucleotides long, usually with a two-base overhang on the 3' end.

Dicer facilitates the formation of the RNAinduced silencing complex (RISC), whose catalytic component argonaute is an endonuclease capable of degrading mRNA.

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