mRNA is the messenger that carries a gene’s recipe to the ribosomes (Brenner et al. 1961). In plants, animals and fungi it is first edited: unneeded pieces are spliced out, and a cap and a tail are added. Some mRNAs are then carried to one part of the cell, to the tip of a nerve cell or the back of an egg, so that their protein is made exactly there; many wait, silent, in droplets of RNA and protein. Established: Replicated many times; textbook knowledge.
Every mRNA is eventually destroyed: in bacteria most last a few minutes (Bernstein et al. 2002), in mammalian cells hours (Schwanhäusser et al. 2011). How long it lasts helps set how much protein is made. I see single mRNAs with smFISH, which lights each one up with dozens of small fluorescent probes (Raj et al. 2008).
Stored or read. There it may be stored, silent, in a droplet with proteins, or released and read by ribosomes into protein. Where and when an mRNA is read decides where and when its protein appears.
In my research: Imaging single mRNAs in RNA–protein condensates →
Sources
- Brenner S, Jacob F, Meselson M (1961) An unstable intermediate carrying information from genes to ribosomes for protein synthesis. Nature 190:576–581. doi:10.1038/190576a0
- Bernstein JA, Khodursky AB, Lin PH, Lin-Chao S, Cohen SN (2002) Global analysis of mRNA decay and abundance in Escherichia coli at single-gene resolution using two-color fluorescent DNA microarrays. PNAS 99:9697–9702. doi:10.1073/pnas.112318199
- Schwanhäusser B, et al. (2011) Global quantification of mammalian gene expression control. Nature 473:337–342. doi:10.1038/nature10098
- Raj A, van den Bogaard P, Rifkin SA, van Oudenaarden A, Tyagi S (2008) Imaging individual mRNA molecules using multiple singly labeled probes. Nature Methods 5:877–879. doi:10.1038/nmeth.1253