Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA; Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Cell. 2018 Mar 22;173(1):20-51. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.03.006.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are ∼22 nt RNAs that direct posttranscriptional repression of mRNA targets in diverse eukaryotic lineages. In humans and other mammals, these small RNAs help sculpt the expression of most mRNAs. This article reviews advances in our understanding of the defining features of metazoan miRNAs and their biogenesis, genomics, and evolution. It then reviews how metazoan miRNAs are regulated, how they recognize and cause repression of their targets, and the biological functions of this repression, with a compilation of knockout phenotypes that shows that important biological functions have been identified for most of the broadly conserved miRNAs of mammals.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) 是约 22 个核苷酸的 RNA,可在不同的真核生物谱系中指导 mRNA 靶标的转录后抑制。在人类和其他哺乳动物中,这些小分子 RNA 有助于塑造大多数 mRNA 的表达。本文综述了我们对后生动物 miRNA 的定义特征及其生物发生、基因组学和进化的理解进展。然后,本文回顾了后生动物 miRNA 的调控方式、它们如何识别和引起靶标的抑制以及这种抑制的生物学功能,并汇编了敲除表型,表明大多数哺乳动物广泛保守的 miRNA 已经确定了重要的生物学功能。