From purple petunias to the brain and memory; slicing and dicing our way toward understanding post-transcriptional gene expression

Imagine a better flower, a super purple, purple, superduper purple, petunia. That was the suggestion, the thought and the motivation for geneticist Rich Jorgensen to add an extra purple gene to a purple petunia back in 1986.

But what happened in Jorgensen's superduper purple petunia experiments? It failed! - but their final explanation has gone on to change our thinking into how genes are expressed and has provided us with insights into whole new mechanisms of gene control and cellular regulation that may provide new keys for treatments of disease and new ways to engineer existing cells and entire organ systems physiological health.

Jorgensen got white, pure white or spotted white flowers instead of purple ones: An unexpected result to say the least since he added extra purple producing genes. Numerous experiments later, it was determined that the RNA itself was interrupting its own expression through complementary binding and the formation of dsRNA molecules; the RNA it seems was literally "interfering with itself" and the concept of RNA interference or RNAi was born.  

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Biosensis anti-Dicer chicken polyclonal antibody (C-1557-100) recognizes two major bands at 220 kDa (which co-migrated with recombinant Dicer) and a smaller band at 125 kDa. Dicer appears to undergo some fragmentation during processing accounting for the lower molecular weight fragment. The antibody has been shown specific for mouse Dicer in adult mouse brain extracts by western blot, immunoprecipitation and siRNA experiments. This antibody was recently published in J Neurochem. Jul;106(2):650-61.