title: Recognizing the 35th anniversary of the proposal that snRNPs are involved in splicing.
abstract: Thirty-five years ago, as young graduate students, we had the pleasure and privilege of being in Joan Steitz's laboratory at a pivotal point in the history of RNA molecular biology. Introns had recently been discovered in the laboratories of Philip Sharp and Richard Roberts, but the machinery for removing them from mRNA precursors was entirely unknown. This Retrospective describes our hypothesis that recently discovered snRNPs functioned in pre-mRNA splicing. The proposal was proven correct, as has Joan's intuition that small RNAs provide specificity to RNA processing reactions through base pairing in diverse settings. However, research over the intervening years has revealed that both splice site selection and splicing itself are much more complex and dynamic than we imagined.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 smount@umd.edu sandra.wolin@yale.edu.
authors.forename: Stephen M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Mount
authors.affiliation: Department of Cell Biology, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06536 smount@umd.edu sandra.wolin@yale.edu.
authors.forename: Sandra L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Wolin
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000846:Anniversaries and Special Events; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D008967:Molecular Biology / Q000266:history*; D012326:RNA Splicing / Q000235:genetics; D012333:RNA, Messenger / Q000235:genetics; D017411:Ribonucleoproteins, Small Nuclear / Q000235:genetics* / Q000266:history*; D017381:Spliceosomes / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D012333:RNA, Messenger; D017411:Ribonucleoproteins, Small Nuclear