Making introns useful

Introns are generally regarded as portions of messenger RNA that do not contain protein-coding information and are discarded after RNA splicing. But certain intronic RNA species have activities that could be useful for gene therapy or functional genomics. Whereas viral gene therapy vectors have yet to overcome immunogenicity and efficiency problems and often integrate at random sites in the genome, researchers are beginning to explore alternative methods for disrupting genes in a specific, stable manner in a wide range of cell types.

University of Texas (Austin, Texas) researchers and colleagues last week published, in Science, that a bacterial group II intron, a transcribed RNA that can integrate into the genome of a host cell, can be engineered to insert into any target DNA site and still retain activity in human cells. The researchers suggested that such introns could be useful to efficiently insert genes into cells of interest for gene therapy, functional genomics or other applications...