VATIS UPDATE Article

Bioengineers at the University of California San Diego, the United States, have developed a new tool to identify interactions between RNA and DNA molecules. The tool, called MARGI (Mapping RNA Genome Interactions), is the first technology that’s capable of providing a full account of all the RNA molecules that interact with a segment of DNA, as well as the locations of all these interactions – in just a single experiment.

RNA molecules can attach to particular DNA sequences to help control how much protein these particular genes produce within a given time, and within a given cell. And by knowing what genes produce these regulatory RNAs, researchers can start to identify new functions and instructions encoded in the genome. The findings of the study have been published in the Current Biology.

Existing methods to study RNA-DNA interactions are only capable of analyzing one RNA molecule at a time, making it impossible to analyze an entire set of RNA-DNA interactions involving hundreds of RNA molecules. “It could take years to analyze all these interactions,” said Tri Nguyen, at UC San Diego. Using MARGI, an entire set of RNA-DNA interactions could be analyzed in a single experiment that takes one to two weeks