An RNA biochemist's affair with proteins.

Abstract

When I was asked for personal reflections on the last twenty years of RNA research, it occurred to me that, although many of us will say that we work on RNA, what we really work on are proteins acting on RNA. I started to work on such proteins in 1988 when I joined the lab of Walter Keller. Using classical biochemical techniques, we purified proteins involved in mRNA polyadenylation. We would then isolate cDNA clones and finally express the protein for functional and structural studies, if possible. In one way or another, protein identification, cDNA cloning, expression and purification are still being carried out in many labs, including my own. However, much of this previously demanding work has been quietly transformed into routine business by a small ensemble of technical advances over the last twenty-odd years. In order to provide a meaningful account of this transformation, which I consider to be one of the most significant developments in this period, I will take the liberty of going slightly beyond the 20-year time frame suggested by the RNA journal.