MicroRNAs: regulators of gene expression and cell differentiation

The existence and roles of a class of abundant regulatory RNA molecules have recently come into sharp focus. Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) are small (approximately 22 bases), non-protein-coding RNAs that recognize target sequences of imperfect complementarity in cognate mRNAs and either destabilize them or inhibit protein translation. Although mechanisms of miRNA biogenesis have been elucidated in some detail, there is limited appreciation of their biological functions. Reported examples typically focus on miRNA regulation of a single tissue-restricted transcript, often one encoding a transcription factor, that controls a specific aspect of development, cell differentiation, or physiology. However, computational algorithms predict up to hundreds of putative targets for individual miRNAs, single transcripts may be regulated by multiple miRNAs, and miRNAs may either eliminate target gene expression or serve to finetune transcript and protein levels. Theoretical considerations and early experimental results hence suggest diverse roles for miRNAs as a class. One appealing possibility, that miRNAs eliminate low-level expression of unwanted genes and hence refine unilineage gene expression, may be especially amenable to evaluation in models of hematopoiesis. This review summarizes current understanding of miRNA mechanisms, outlines some of the important outstanding questions, and describes studies that attempt to define miRNA functions in hematopoiesis.