Becker's World of the Cell 9th Edition by Lewis Kleinsmith, Jeff Hardin, Gregory Paul Bertoni

Exercise 12

RNA Non-Interference. You are helping a new student in a lab that studies C. elegans. The student has generated engineered DNA for use in RNAi from genomic DNA for a gene of interest to the lab. She is puzzled that the clone does not have an effect, even though she knows, based on available mutants, that loss of the function of this gene causes worms to die as larvae. You look at the sequence of the DNA she used to make the feeding clone and discover that it corresponds to an intron in the gene. What would you say to the student to explain why her experiment did not succeed