May 14, 2009

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An ingenious new method of obtaining marine microbe samples while preserving the microbes' natural gene expression has yielded an unexpected boon: the presence of many varieties of small RNAs--snippets of RNA that act as switches to regulate gene expression in these single-celled creatures, MIT researchers report in the May 14 issue of Nature. Before now, small RNA could only be studied in lab-cultured microorganisms.Full Story

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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