A journey to the end of the message
- Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA
- Corresponding author: jlm2{at}columbia.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
As do many good things, my interest in how mRNA 3′ ends are made came about serendipitously. Ever since I was an undergrad here at Columbia in the early 1970s, I had been interested in figuring out how RNA polymerase (RNAP) begins transcription. This fascination began while I worked in the lab of the late Geoffrey Zubay, who had just developed the “Zubay system,” which for the first time allowed accurate transcription, and then translation, of exogenous DNA (a lacZ gene carried in a transducing λ phage; this was in the days before recombinant DNA) in an extract of Escherichia coli. I continued studies on translation using the Zubay system as a graduate student with Ray Gesteland at Cold Spring Harbor (this involved a detour into something called “protein splicing,” but that's another story…). However, I remained fascinated with how RNAP initiates transcription, especially in mammalian cells. This was …
