I have a student group in an upper level lab course who would like to try to knockdown multiple miRNAs using RNAi feeding.
I have searched the literature fairly extensively and have not found any references that report using RNAi to knockdown RNAis.
This makes me suspect it has been tried and does not work. I have seen the papers that have successfully used injection of antisense oligonucleotides,
but we do not have easy access to a microinjection apparatus. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.
–Jim
I don’t know the answer to your question, but there is a more basic issue: feeding of multiple RNAi clones is controversial. Some publications say it is ineffective (that the result is neither RNAi phenotype is observed), while others claim it works. At the least, it’s not something I would recommend depending on.
Mutants are available for many microRNAs. Obviously building a lot of double mutants would be very time consuming, but - if feeding RNAi were to work on microRNAs - your students could perhaps use RNAi to inactivate one microRNA in a strain lacking the other due to mutation.