Twenty years ago it was discovered that many people suffering from autoimmune diseases produce autoanti-bodies against Sm proteins — a family of proteins that bind to nuclear RNA. Subsequent work showed that the Sm proteins are involved in removing introns (regions not encoding the protein product) from messenger RNA precursors. Now, a study by Kam-bach et al. in Cell reports the crystal structures of two Sm protein complexes, and offers new insights into the architecture of the RNA splicing machinery.
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