Argonaute Journeys into the Heart of RISC.

This article focuses on diseases in historical periods. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, the citizens of Thebes are cursed by a plague that will end only when the murderer of Laius, their former ruler, is identified and banished. Although there are many things to be learned from this drama, one conclusion relates directly to the process of discovery: The object of an intensive search sometimes turns out to be hiding in plain view. The Hannon and Joshua-Tor laboratories have now used a battery of biophysical, biochemical, and genetic approaches to examine Argonaute structure and function 1, 2.