Watching fruit flies buzz around the ripe bananas in your kitchen, you might think it’s a tad ludicrous, mortifying even, that humans have a similar number of genes—about 23,000—as the lowly insects.

Researchers at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona have created the first blueprint of the human spliceosome, the most complex and intricate molecular machine inside every cell. The ...

In the first step of spliceosome assembly, an snRNA molecule known as U1 snRNA binds to the 5' splice site at the beginning of the intron. Until now, it had been thought that the binding strength ...

A complex molecular machine, the spliceosome, ensures that the genetic information from the genome, after being transcribed into mRNA precursors, is correctly assembled into mature mRNA. Splicing is a ...

Precursor mRNA splicing to remove introns and join exons, producing mature mRNA, is a key regulatory step for gene expression. Canonical pre-mRNA splicing of introns is catalysed by a large complex of ...

Gene transcription produces pre-messenger RNAs (pre-mRNA) that are composed of exons and introns as the first RNA species. Subsequent splicing consists of the deletion of introns and the specific ...

In human cells, only a small proportion of the information written in genes is used to produce proteins. How does the cell select this information? A large molecular machine called the spliceosome ...

Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona have created the first blueprint of the human spliceosome, the most complex and intricate molecular machine inside every cell. The ...

WHEN WE HUMANS got a first glimpse of our genome, we had good reason to question our biological complexity. Many scientists predicted we would possess some 100,000-plus genes, but sequencers finally ...

From neurosurgery to bar code readers, lasers have been used in a myriad of applications since they were first introduced in the late 1950’s. Now, with the work being done in Jeff Gelles’ Lab at ...

After a decade of work, scientists have completed a molecular model of the human spliceosome, an incredibly complex cellular machine. When an active gene is expressed in a cell, it is transcribed into ...