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Dynamics of RNA–protein interactions studied in living cells

An understanding of how quickly biomolecules bind and dissociate in cells is crucial for developing quantitative models of biology, but measurements of these kinetics were possible only using purified proteins in vitro — until now.
  1. Olivia S. Rissland

    1. Olivia S. Rissland is in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, and in the RNA Bioscience Initiative, University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, Aurora, Colorado 80045, USA.

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As the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky stated1 in 1973, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Many modern biologists might add that nothing in molecular biology makes sense except in the light of biochemistry — without the quantitative understanding that biochemistry provides, how can biologists predict the effect of a twofold reduction in the levels of a protein during the early development of an organism, or of a tenfold increase in the concentration of another protein in cancer cells? The chasm between the streamlined experiments of biochemistry and the messy complexity of the cell has long seemed unbridgeable. Now, writing in Nature, Sharma et al.2 report a technique that enables the biochemical analysis of molecular interactions in cells.

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Nature 591, 39-40 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00236-3

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