Olga Gvozdeva

By O.V. Gvozdeva and E.L. Chernolovskaya

This review focuses on current strategies of development of noncanonical synthetic RNA interference (RNAi) inducers with structural modifications for promoting better gene silencing with low risk of side effects. A particular focus is on longer RNA duplexes 25–30 nucleotides (nt) in length that mimic Dicer substrates to improve interaction of RNAi inducers with RNAi machinery. Various design strategies of efficient Dicer substrate small-interfering RNA (siRNA) are described. It was found that the length, chemical modifications, and overhang structure influence the gene silencing activity and RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) assembly. Special attention is paid to the long double-stranded RNA duplexes that induce effective gene silencing in Dicer-dependent or Dicer-independent mode. Some structural variants of shorter siRNAs, including hairpin and dumbbell siRNAs and fork-siRNA (fsiRNA) with several nucleotide substitutions at the 3′ end of the sense strand, are also analyzed. These structural modifications provide efficiently increased gene silencing of targets with unfavorable duplex thermodynamic asymmetry. Recent data remove the length and structure limits for the design of RNAi effectors, and add another example in the list of novel RNAi-inducing molecules differing from the classical siRNA, which is discussed in this chapter.

Part of the book: RNA Interference