(CNN)Mourners held a heavenly birthday memorial Sunday for Victoria Martens, the 10-year-old New Mexico girl who Albuquerque police say was raped by her mother's boyfriend and then killed while her mother watched.
RNA interference (RNAi) is a natural process that cells use to 'turn off' or silence unwanted or harmful genes. The initial discovery of this phenomenon was in 1991, by scientists trying to deepen the colour of petunias. Surprisingly, by introducing a gene for colour, they found that they had turned off the gene.
RNA interference, or RNAi, is a well-recognized and evolutionarily conserved pathway of cellular defense that has been observed in nearly every eukaryotic organism studied. The functional component that directs RNAi is a 21-23 nucleotide (nt) RNA duplex, also know as a small interfering RNA or siRNA. In nature these duplexes are produced by the cell in response to a number of events that generate long double-stranded RNA transcripts. Examples of such events include viral replication, sequence transposition and abnormal transcription of native genes.