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. 2023 Jul 17;10:32. doi: 10.1186/s40779-023-00468-6

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 1 — A graphical illustration of miRNA biogenesis. The pre-miRNAs have one or more incomplete hairpin structures that have a stem of about 33 base pairs. Ribonucleases Drosha and Dicer process the pri-miRNA precursor in two separate processes. In the nucleus, Drosha first cuts the pri-miRNA into a pre-miRNA about 70 nucleotides in length, which is then transferred to the cytoplasm by XPO5. The mature, functional, ds miRNA is then processed by Dicer using the pre-miRNA as a template. After maturation, the miRNA is covalently linked to RISC, a multiprotein complex that contains the AGO protein and is essential for RNA silencing. Exon 1 and exon 2 are connected together when the RNA splicing process takes place and leads to the formation of the lariat RNA (circular molecules with a short tail). Following RNA splicing and additional processing, the intron-containing spliced lariat may function as a pri-miRNA for intronic miRNA synthesis. XPO5 exportin-5, ds double-stranded, RISC RNA-induced silencing complex, AGO argonaute, ADAR adenosine deaminase RNA specific, TRBP tar RNA-binding protein, EGFR epidermal growth factor receptor