Hailing Jin, an IIGB professor of plant pathology and microbiology, and colleagues report in a paper published in Nature Communications that the structure of small RNA (an essential nucleic acid for all known forms of life and made from DNA) plays an important role in small RNA sorting. Without this sorting, RNA gene silencing, caused by the binding of RNA snippets or small RNA to RNA and involved in almost all cellular processes, would be inefficient and possibly not occur.

To direct the silencing of target genes, small RNA binds to a protein call Argonaute protein (many organisms possess multiple Argonaute proteins). The small RNAs, processed from double-stranded RNA precursors, first form a short double-stranded RNA structure called a duplex structure, which must be “sorted” into an appropriate Argonaute protein, with one strand selected as the functional small RNA while the other strand gets degraded. The findings suggest that by simply designing the small RNA duplex structure, small RNAs could be directed into desired Argonaute proteins, which has beneficial potential for agriculture.

Jin, also the director of the Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics Graduate Program, was joined in the research by Xiaoming Zhang, DongDong Niu, Airong Wang, Angel Lee, Vinnary Tun and Chia-en A. Chang in IIGB; Alberto Carbonell and James C. Carrington at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Mo.; and Zonghua Wang at Fujian Agricultural and Forestry University, China.