The EMBO J 32: 2804–2818 ; DOI: 10.1038/emboj.2013.198; published online September 03 2013
In his 1543 monumental work De humanis corpori fabrica, Andreas Vesalius used rigorous dissection practices and a mechanistic view of the organ’s function to provide the first accurate anatomical description of a human heart. Guided by similar principles of meticulous structural probing and mechanistic explanatory potential, Anokhina and colleagues in this issue of The EMBO Journal dissect the molecular topology of the RNA heart of the Spliceosome, the ribonucleoprotein machinery in charge of intron removal. Their findings reveal key structural features with important implications for understanding the mechanisms of pre-mRNA splicing catalysis.