Nobel Laureate Dr. Phil Sharp explains the process of RNA splicing
Originally created for Learn About Spinal Muscular Atrophy ( www.learnaboutsma.org/ )
TRANSCRIPT:
Oh, well, the discovery I made in the '77 was of the split gene nature of the genes in human cells. What I mean by that is that if you look at the information within a gene and in terms of the DNA sequence, it is interrupted by non-informational DNA or nonsense DNA. The nonsense DNA is called introns, the sense DNA is called exons. So you get exon, intron, exon, intron type patterns in genes. They have to remove the nonsense for the gene work, the cell does, and it does that by splicing out the nonsense and putting the sense segments together. The cell in essence edits the structure of a gene to make the information that is then used by the cell as a functional unit for cellular activities. So we discovered that in 1977 in Cold Spring Harbor in parallel and independently made a similar discovery.