Synthesis of dumbbell-shaped cyclic RNAs for RNA interference

RNA interference (RNAi) is a potent and highly specific gene-silencing phenomenon that was first reported for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. It has been discovered that genes could be silenced by introducing double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) complementary to the messenger RNA sequences. Since then, RNAi has been shown as an evolutionarily well-conserved process that plays an important role in host defense and in regulation of gene expression. Much effort has been dedicated to the application of the short dsRNA species (short interfering RNAs; siRNAs) as therapeutic agents, as they were shown to be effective in mammalian cells. Recently, we altered the structure of a siRNA molecule and produced dumbbell-shaped nanocircular RNAs. RNA dumbbells were shown to be stabilized in serum compared with its siRNA counterpart, despite their natural RNA strand. It has also been found that RNA dumbbells containing a 23-bp stem and two 9-nt loops exhibit a prolonged RNAi effect in cultured mammalian cells. In this unit, we describe the synthesis of RNA dumbbells from the design, its enzymatic synthesis, and to the purification.