A macromolecular shredder for RNA: Researchers unravel the structure of the machinery for RNA disposal
Monday, February 4, 2013 - 09:00
in Biology & Nature
Much in the same way as we use shredders to destroy documents that are no longer useful or that contain potentially damaging information, cells use molecular machines to degrade unwanted or defective macromolecules. Scientists of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, Germany, have now decoded the structure and the operating mechanism of the Exosome, a macromolecular machine responsible for degradation of ribonucleic acids (RNAs) in eukaryotes. RNAs are ubiquitous and abundant molecules with multiple functions in the cell. One of their functions is, for example, to permit translation of the genomic information into proteins.