message stability

[Cornelius Krasel]

Henry (sticknbd at ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu) wrote:
: I just ran a time-course where some initial mRNAs
: went down but others stayed up.  I am hypothesizing
: that this has to do with message stability, but I am
: not familiar with standard means of confirming such
: an hypothesis.

There are several possibilities I am aware of:
1) Pulse-chase labeling in vivo with tritiated uracil.
2) Measurement of RNA stability in the presence of Actinomycin D (I
   think this works only for prokaryotes). Actinomycin D inhibits
   the RNA polymerase, therefore if you measure RNA stability, you
   measure RNA decay directly.
3) Nuclear run-off transcripts (I am not familiar with this one)

--Cornelius.

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