Development of the DharmaconTM SMARTvectorTM Lentiviral shRNA microRNA-adapted scaffold and algorithm for functional shRNAs

Introduction RNA interference (RNAi) is an endogenous, post-transcriptional gene silencing pathway that utilizes small, noncoding RNAs to target specific mRNA transcripts for degradation. Target-gene knockdown by RNAi can be mediated by synthetic short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) introduced into cells by transfection, or by short hairpin RNA (shRNA) expression constructs introduced into cells by plasmid transfection or viral transduction (Figure 1A).