If you are attending the Molecular Parasitology meeting at Woods Hole this year, make sure you hear the talk by Erandi in Manuel Llinas’ lab at Princeton. Using protein binding microarrays (PBM), Manuel, his group and his Harvard collaborators have validated 3 of the Plasmodium falciparum motifs we predicted using FIRE in our forthcoming Molecular Cell paper. Their excellent work also happens to be the first characterization of specific DNA-binding proteins in Plasmodium.
miRNA target protectors September 2, 2007
Schier and colleagues have developed what looks like a promising technology for studying miRNA functions: morpholinos-based target protectors. They designed 25nt-long morpholinos complementary to miRNA target sites in 3′UTRs and injected them into zebrafish embryos. This appears to efficiently and specifically prevent miRNA-based translational inhibition. As morpholinos are used in many organisms and can even be delivered in cultured cells, this technique should become widely used and may help reveal the full extent of miRNA functions.
