Janell M. Schelter

TL;DR: These results suggest that metazoan miRNAs can reduce the levels of many of their target transcripts, not just the amount of protein deriving from these transcripts, and seem to downregulate a far greater number of targets than previously appreciated.

TL;DR: This paper used gene expression profiling to characterize the specificity of gene silencing by siRNAs in cultured human cells and found that siRNA-specific rather than target-specific signatures revealed direct silencing of nontargeted genes containing as few as eleven contiguous nucleotides of identity to the siRNA.

TL;DR: It is found that 60-mer oligonucleotides reliably detect transcript ratios at one copy per cell in complex biological samples, and that ink-jet arrays are compatible with several different sample amplification and labeling techniques.

TL;DR: In all cases, off-target transcript silencing was accompanied by loss of the corresponding protein and occurred with dependence on siRNA concentration similar to that of silencing of the target transcript.

TL;DR: Key to the modification was 2'-O-methyl ribosyl substitution at position 2 in the guide strand, which reduced silencing of most off-target transcripts with complementarity to the seed region of the siRNA guide strand.