This article was review by Thomas Cooper, MD from Baylor College of Medicine. Stay up to date on the latest science with Brush Up Summaries. Despite its significance, alternative splicing’s global ...

Proteins are the tiny machines that keep our cells running, and how long they last in the cell often determines how well they ...

Genes contain the essential building instructions for life, guiding cells on which amino acids to assemble in what sequence to produce specific proteins. The human genome codes for about 20,000 such ...

What kills most people who die from cancer is not the initial tumor. It’s the intolerable disease burden on the body that arises when tumor cells continually expand their numbers after spreading to ...

Alternative splicing, a clever way a cell generates many different variations of messenger RNAs -- single-stranded RNAs involved in protein synthesis -- and proteins from the same stretch of DNA, ...

Pre-mRNA splicing in a subset of human short introns is governed by a distinct mechanism involving a new splicing factor, new research finds. The interrupted non-coding regions in pre-mRNAs, termed ...

USP39 stabilizes the spliceosome (green), which cuts out unneeded parts (grey and purple) of the mRNA. If USP39 is missing, some of the mRNA is poorly processed. This results in misfolded proteins, ...

The interrupted non-coding regions in pre-mRNAs, termed “introns,” are excised by “splicing” to generate mature coding mRNAs that are translated into proteins. As human pre-mRNA introns vary in length ...

Protein-coding genes carry the blueprint for protein production. In higher organisms, however, most of the coding-gene transcripts, or pre-mRNAs, are separated by non-coding sequences called "introns, ...