ABSTRACT
Andrew Fire and Craig Mello proved that double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) conferred specic gene silencing in Caenorhabditis elegans (Fire et al. 1998). The incredible signicance of this discovery did not disappear within the scientic community, and both were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. The loss of function phenotype resulting from RNAi was rst observed in the petunia; and the mechanism elucidated by Fire and Mello after C. elegans were injected with long strands of dsRNA that amazingly displayed potency several orders of magnitude greater than the antisense single-stranded molecules (Fire et al. 1998).
