Dial It Up, Dial It Down

摘要

One of the biggest surprises to come from sequencing efforts of the past 15 years is how little of the human genome is translated into proteins. We have about as many protein-coding genes, 20,000, as the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. And yet, roughly 80 percent of our genome is transcribed into RNA. Long or short, looping or straight, rigid or not, most of this rabble of transcripts never crosses what was once thought of as molecular biology's finish line by being translated into proteins. Those RNAs may well harbor some explanations for why we differ from worms, and they often turn up in genome-wide studies as being associated with disease. But most of these so-called noncoding RNAs have no known function.