{"id":157025,"date":"2019-12-12T08:12:13","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T13:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=157025"},"modified":"2019-12-11T09:53:27","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T14:53:27","slug":"micro-rnas-keep-stem-cells-growing-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2019\/12\/micro-rnas-keep-stem-cells-growing-fast\/","title":{"rendered":"Micro-RNAs Keep Stem Cells From Growing Up Too Fast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There comes a point in every cell\u2019s life when it has to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. Young cells, so-called stem cells, take their clues to their future career primarily from the environment they find themselves in. But in a new embryo, that environment is constantly in flux; how does a cell know how long to wait before it makes an irrevocable choice?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>UConn Health Director of the Center for Quantitative Medicine Reinhard Laubenbacher and computational biologist Russell Posner think they have the answer, published in a pair of articles in the Journal of the Royal Society and the upcoming February 2020 issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Laubenbacher and Posner were trying to figure out what micro-RNAs (\u00b5RNAs) do. \u00b5RNAs are tiny bits of almost-DNA that zoom between the cell\u2019s control center and its protein factories. Called micro-ribonucleic acids (\u00b5RNAs), they\u2019re similar to the longer RNAs that ferry messages from DNA to the protein making parts of the cell. But the purpose of most \u00b5RNAs has been a mystery.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the time, cell biologists trying to figure out what something does will block it so the cell can\u2019t make it, and study what happens when it\u2019s not there. But biologists who\u2019ve blocked out individual \u00b5RNAs often find nothing amiss. The cells, even whole organisms, develop normally.<\/p>\n<p>Laubenbacher and Posner approached the problem differently. Instead of knocking out individual \u00b5RNAs, what would happen if they took out all of them? Or half of them? To find out, they built a computational model of a stem cell. When they ran the model, they saw that the number of \u00b5RNAs was connected to the speed at which a stem cell matured. The more \u00b5RNAs, the slower a stem cell moved toward its ultimate fate. When there were too few \u00b5RNAs, the cell developed too quickly. It was almost as if the \u00b5RNAs were a web of interference. As long as there were enough, they slowed the cell development to the right speed. But there was a critical threshold at which the cell sped up.<\/p>\n<p>Laubenbacher and Posner believe no individual \u00b5RNA is critical at the scale of a whole cell; it\u2019s just their numerousness that matters. Now they would like to collaborate with a developmental biologist to test the model\u2019s result in living cells.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>This research was funded by the US Army Research Office.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UConn Health researchers believe they&#8217;ve solved a mystery that&#8217;s long puzzled observers: what are so-called micro-RNAs for? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":157107,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2076,179],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1899],"class_list":["post-157025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-uconn-health"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 01:50:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157025"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":157108,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157025\/revisions\/157108"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/157107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157025"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=157025"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=157025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}