No, this isn’t a Russian short story.

Lead authors postdoc alum Sebastian Kadener and Mol Cell Biol graduate student Joe Rodriguez and their coworkers used tiling arrays to look for targets of the enzyme Drosha in “Genome-wide identification of targets of the drosha–pasha/DGCR8 complex”, a paper recently published in the journal RNA. Drosha is a type III RNAse that is involved in the processing of  miRNAs. This paper demonstrates for first time that this enzyme is not only involved in miRNA processing, but can also process mRNAs.  Interestingly, the best example of an mRNA processed by Drosha is the mRNA that encodes another miRNA processing enzyme, the protein Pasha. As this is a partner of Drosha (the two proteins work together), the findings suggest that  there is a feedback loop that controls the abundance of the miRNA processing machinery and probably the abundance of miRNAs themselves.