HHMI Bulletin / Winter 2013 /
For a cell, the past informs the present. We humans have search engines like Google and Yahoo to sift through the Internet’s gobs of historical information and learn from others’ mistakes and successes. In some cells of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, it turns out, a type of RNA, called Piwi-interacting RNA (piRNA), and its partner, an Argonaute protein called Piwi, run a similar search. The piRNA and protein continuously peruse the cell’s library of data and detect how it previously dealt with a particular molecule—whether an invading virus or a cell’s own genetic material… Read more at HHMI.