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. 2014 Jun 1;2:16. doi: 10.1186/2052-8426-2-16

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© Donzelli et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. 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.

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The biogenesis of miRNAs. RNA polymerase II transcribes miRNA gene, generating a long primary transcript (pri miRNA). Drosha-mediated cleavage of pri-miRNA leads to the formation of a hairpin molecule, the pre-microRNA that is exported to the cytoplasm by the complex exportin-5/RAN-GTP. In the cytoplasm, Dicer cleaves the pre-miRNA and produces a ~22-nt RNA duplex. The functional strand of the duplex is incorporated into a multiple-protein nuclease complex, the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), which regulates protein expression.