Sensing intracellular signatures with synthetic mRNAs

ABSTRACT

The bottom-up assembly of biological components in synthetic biology has contributed to a better understanding of natural phenomena and the development of new technologies for practical applications. Over the past few decades, basic RNA research has unveiled the regulatory roles of RNAs underlying gene regulatory networks; while advances in RNA biology, in turn, have highlighted the potential of a wide variety of RNA elements as building blocks to construct artificial systems. In particular, synthetic mRNA-based translational regulators, which respond to signals in cells and regulate the production of encoded output proteins, are gaining attention with the recent rise of mRNA therapeutics. In this Review, we discuss recent progress in RNA synthetic biology, mainly focusing on emerging technologies for sensing intracellular protein and RNA molecules and controlling translation.

KEYWORDS:

• Synthetic biology
• Translational regulation
• miRNA
• RNA-binding protein

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Kelvin Hui and Chen Jung (Kyoto University) for the critical reading of this manuscript. We also thank Hiromi Takemoto and Yoshiko Ogawa (Kyoto University) for their administrative support.

Author contributions

H.O. and H.S wrote and edited the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

H.S. owns shares of aceRNA Technologies Ltd. and is an outside director of aceRNA Technologies Ltd.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed for this review article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JP20H05626]; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JP22K20628].