First person: How we discovered fluoride riboswitches

Scientific discoveries come through many different means. Breakthroughs can result from purposefully-executed research projects that are perhaps punctuated with unexpected flashes of insight. In rare cases, discoveries occur through a chain of highly improbable, very lucky, occurrences. I strongly prefer my research team to stay on the first path and use their highly developed scientific skills to guide their efforts towards a rational goal. But dumb luck sometimes does play an essential role, which was true in the discovery of fluoride riboswitches. Zasha Weinberg, a research scientist and bioinformatics expert, started the chain of events by uncovering a new collection of RNA molecules and predicted that members of this new class would be riboswitches - a piece of messenger RNA that senses chemicals and regulates the expression of genes. After discovering nearly two dozen other types of riboswitches, my Yale team had become adept at correctly predicting the target each new riboswitch class had evolved to sense.