Importin alpha siRNA - Looking for siRNA for knockdown of all Importin alpha subtypes (Jul/20/2010 )

Dear colleagues,

as there are 9 human Importin alpha subtypes (alpha1, alpha2, ...) I was wondering if there are siRNAs which can knockdown all subtypes simultaniously. There are two regions 100 % conserved in alle 9 Importin alphas. Have you ever seen such an siRNA in a publication?

Thanks a lot for your help!!!

Best,

Dani123

There appears to be a couple publications with siRNA-mediated knockdown of importin alpha isoforms but the authors used a mix of different siRNAs, each designed for a specific isoform.

See:
Quensel et al. MCB, Dec 2004
Nitahara-Kasahara et al. J. of Virology, May 2007

I came to the same conclution, as there is no conserved strech between the different importin alphas that allows siRNA design. The same problem is for the 3 subtypes of the importin alpha family, which are said to be "more" conserved.

Thanks for the literature!