noncoding RNA tagged posts

A team led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers has discovered a new way that cells regulate senescence, an irreversible end to cell division. The findings, published in Cell, could one day lead to new interventions for a variety of conditions associated with aging, including neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and cancer, as well as new therapies for a collection of diseases known as ribosomopathies.

“There is great interest in reducing senescence to slow or reverse aging or aging-associated diseases...

Making memories involves more than seeing friends or taking photos. The brain constantly adapts to new information and stores memories by building connections among neurons, called synapses. How neurons do this — reaching out arm-like dendrites to communicate with other neurons — requires a ballet of genes, signaling molecules, cellular scaffolding and protein-building machinery.

A new study from scientists at Scripps Research and the Max P...

Dr. Joshua Mendell CREDIT: UT Southwestern Medical Center

A gene called NORAD has been found to help maintain the proper number of chromosomes in cells, and that when inactivated, causes the number of chromosomes in a cell to become unstable, a key feature of cancer cells.

Previously, genes that encode the recipe for making proteins have been implicated in maintaining the proper number of chromosomes in a cell. The NORAD gene, however, does not encode a protein. Instead, NORAD produces a long noncoding RNA, a type of molecule that was not previously known to be important in chromosome maintenance.

Researchers began studying this particular molecule because the RNA kicks into action after DNA is damaged; they therefore termed it Noncoding RNA Activated by DNA Damage, or NORAD.
The scientist...