[Ronin]

Can you give me a gist of what makes this paper so interesting? Most FReepers are not microbiologists.

[aruanan]

From a little bit farther along:

As these receptors have a central role in linking pathogen recognition to the induction of innate immunity, inflammation and eventually adaptive immunity, understanding the regulation of the signaling cascade is important.

[aruanan]

And from a little bit farther along than that:

Thus, it will be interesting to study the functional consequence of miRNA expression both in vivo and in vitro during bacterial infection and the mechanism through which they affect innate immunity. It remains to be determined whether dysregulation of miRNAs is causal to the development and progression of inflammatory diseases. Finally, revealing the modest regulation of TLR signaling by miRNAs will provide promising drug discovery targets against various inflammatory diseases.

[allmendream]

Almost every medicinal therapeutic has, as a molecular mechanism, the targeting of a preexisting biological pathway; either pumping up a biological response that is necessary, or interfering with a biological response that has gotten out of control (such as excessive inflammation).

Knowledge of these pathways increases the ‘targets’ of drug discovery.

It is also cool because the RNA itself is effecting a change.

Usually DNA-> RNA -> Functional protein. And the functional protein does all the cool stuff with signal transduction, gene activation, etc, etc.

This is cool because it is DNA -> functional RNA.

[neverdem]

Can you give me a gist of what makes this paper so interesting? Most FReepers are not microbiologists.

It's an open access recent review article of basic immunology. Iimmunology and microbiology are complimentary fields. Physicians need to understand this stuff too. Some are just science junkies.

aruanan & allmendream, thanks for pitching in!