What is Mirtron? | Cancer Biology | RNA Biology | Transcriptomics #biology #cancer #research #phd

Añadido: 2026-06-07

[00:00:00]So, what is basically mitron?

[00:00:06]Mitrons are the micro RNAs that are derived or processed from the intronic region of a protein coding gene. You go to PubMed and search for mitrons, you'll get thousands of papers.

[00:00:18]>> What?

[00:00:19]>> Yep, you may get hundreds of papers.

[00:00:22]Most probably.

[00:00:24]Whatever. Both the mitrons and other micro RNAs are responsible for regulating target mRNAs by complementary base pairing that will finally leads to either mRNA degradation or translation repression. Thus, no proteins will be produced.

[00:00:39]>> Oh, no.

[00:00:40]>> So, what is the significance of these mitrons over other micro RNAs? Number one, mitrons are processed from the junk space of DNA as a result of gene splicing. Splicing is the process in transcription where non-coding sequences or introns are removed from newly transcribed premature mRNAs, but the coding sequences or exons are joined together to form mature mRNAs. In human, only 2 to 3% of genome encode the protein coding region, but the vast majority consisting of non-coding regions. So, my question [music] is, why on the earth these micro RNAs that are residing within the introns?

[00:01:15]Why?

[00:01:21]Number two.

[00:01:24]Mitrons follow Drosha-independent biogenesis. What is that?

[00:01:28]Canonical micro RNAs or micro RNAs other than mitrons are generated through well-characterized multi-step process.

[00:01:35]Micro RNAs are transcribed by RNA polymerase II as primary micro RNAs.

[00:01:40]Drosha is a ribonuclease III enzyme that processes primary micro RNAs into premature [music] micro RNAs. Whereas, the spliced introns containing mitron sequences exist initially as lariat or loop structure. And this intron will be linearized by debranching [music] enzyme. Intron folds into hairpin-like structure that resembles as a premature microRNA. Because it already looked like a premature microRNA, it doesn't require a Drosha cleavage. Wow, interesting, isn't it?

[00:02:10]Number three.

[00:02:13]Most of the spliced introns will be quickly degraded in normal cells. But, mitrons processed from the spliced introns [music] evade this degradation and further process to form mature microRNAs. How?

[00:02:25]So, what do you think about mitrons?

[00:02:27]Comment below. Let's discuss further.

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[00:02:33]>> Hey, bro. What is actually microRNA?

[00:02:36]>> God damn it.

[00:02:41]>> [music]