Welcome Interference

With an excited puppy, being able to calm it down is essential to keeping things under control. In the same way, hyperactive genes – the molecular starting points for all the material in our body – sometimes need subduing. One of the body’s tools for this is RNA interference – a trick that uses strands of RNA (genetic material similar to DNA) to quell gene expression. Researchers looking to replicate that technique use ‘small interfering RNA’ (siRNA), but have so far been limited to certain areas of the body. Now a new approach has modified their structure to make them linger longer when introduced to the brain (shown here in red within the blue-stained hippocampus cells of a non-human primate). Injected siRNAs blocked the activity of huntingtin in mice, the gene that causes Huntington’s disease, raising hopes that this approach to genetic tinkering will lead to new treatments for neurological disorders.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Alterman, Godhino, Hassler and Ferguson, and colleagues
• RNA Therapeutics Institute, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA
• Image provided by and copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature Biotechnology, August 2019