Lab Jargon

Just came back from a run along my "regular" jogging route: I run from our apartment (the star) to Parc Montsouris and then run around the park as many times as I see fit. A little rainy.

I'm learning a new technique in the lab: the use of small interfering RNA's, or siRNA. It's funny: I did my PhD in molecular and cell biology from 1998-2002, and have been mostly out of the lab since then, with the exception of a few brief but productive trips back to the research game. Anyways, this siRNA was just in its infancy when I was in graduate school, and not a well-utilized technique by any stretch of the imagination. Now it's considered fairly routine, and it's about time that I learned how to do it. The concept is not difficult: DNA, as you may remember from Biology 101, makes messenger RNA, which makes proteins--which help the cell to run smoothly. A lab studying plants a few years ago made the discovery that very short strands of RNA with sequences that are complementary to messenger RNA can target specific messages for degradation. In essence, it's another way of regulating genes: the cell can turn off a gene by making an siRNA against it. In the lab, you can take advantage of this cellular machinery by designing and synthesizing your own siRNAs to "knock-out" the expression of a particular gene. Pretty slick.