In a new study published in Journal of the American Chemical Society, Chen-Yu Zhang's group at Nanjing University reports photo-clickable miRNAs as probes for intracellular target identification of miRNAs.
MiRNAs are a class of naturally occurring small non-coding RNAs that have been linked to biological possesses and diseases development. However, identification of target genes associated with miRNAs, which is the basic way to understand miRNA-involved cellular processes, is still a major challenge in miRNA chemical-biology due to the lack of functional miRNA bearing appropriate tags. In the present study, in order to overcome the limitation that 3'-biotinylation on miRNAs could cause loss of miRNA function, Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues pre-tag miRNAs at the 3'-end with bio-orthogonal group that can undergo photo-click reaction. The photo-clickable miRNAs are able to form functional complexes with target genes upon delivery into cells and target genes associated with the photo-clickable miRNAs could be tagged with molecular handle through photo-click reaction for pull-down and identification.
This work is important for the following reasons:
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