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the expression of a gene. Ds RNAs more than 30 bp long induce cell death in mammalian cells.

Applications of RNA interference

One application which is both feasible and attractive is to use RNA interference to study the function of new genes. As we know, the human genome has over 30,000 genes and the function of all of these is not known. By silencing the expression of a gene (s) either sequentially or multiple genes at once, we can study the effect of their loss on observable characteristics of cells, like survival and growth. This is of clinical importance as the expression of several genes is elevated in cancer.

A futuristic application which is currently plagued by the lack of an adequate delivery system is to use this technology to silence expression of certain genes selectively in humans. For instance it could be used to suppress the genes responsible for the virulence of a pathogen (like the hepatitis virus in the liver) or those that are crucial for proliferation of cancer cells. The question is how to deliver nucleic acids to the site of a tumor or infection intact? One vehicle which has been tried in animals is viruses (adeno, lenti and retroviruses) which are engineered to express ds RNA molecules complementary to a region of the mRNA for a specific gene. The other alternative is to use synthetic nucleic acids. This technology is still a dream for scientists, especially to stand a clinical trial phase.

Learn more about this author, Subhankar Chakraborty.
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