For research scientist- cancer.I have an interview tomorrow for a phd project. Pls help?

I have an interview tomorrow for a phd project. My address is drdeti@yahoo.com I don't get understnd one of the scientific article that I should prepare. Could anyone who is a research scientist and knows abpur m RNA splicing and how it affects extracellular signals help? Please let me know by writing a message. Thanks- would be very grateful

For research scientist- cancer.I have an interview tomorrow for a phd project. Pls help?
Well, I'm no researcher, and the likelihood that someone is just going to give you detailed info about it is slim. Maybe you can take a favour from an undergrad.





mRNA splicing is peformed by small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs). They are a protein RNA complex that binds to a certain consesus sequence at the boarder of an intron. There are many of them and they complex together and change confirmation in such a way to splice the RNA and excise the intron. I don't remember of the top of my head, since you can look it up any time. There are good figures in Molecular Bio of the Cell (Alberts et al.) but Wikipedia is good too.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_splici...








The actual effect it would have of extracellular signaling is that certain mRNA transcripts can be spliced in alternate ways resulting in translation to a different product that can have a drastically different activity. Off the top of my head I can think of half an example: calcitonin is produced in the thyroid gland by C cells, in these cells the gene is spliced to produce calcitonin (stimulates bone mineralization). In other parts of the body the same gene is alternatly spliced to make something completely different in function. Right now I can't remember what that is though.





So through alternate splicing extracellular (paracrine, endocrine, autocrine signaling) signalling can change from cell type to cell type, or under different conditions, due to the alternate splicing of an mRNA transcript. This happens in eukaryotes only (not bacteria).





I would get out my books and give a more detailed answer with citations and all, but I have an organic chemistry exam tomorrow, too bad you didn't catch me last term when I had my molecular bio exam. I hope this helps, the wikipedia articles are accurate, and this info although undetailed is accurate.





Cheers, and good luck.





John