The dark matter rises: the expanding world of regulatory RNAs.

摘要: The ability to sequence genomes and characterize their products has begun reveal the central role for regulatory RNAs in biology, especially complex organisms. It is now evident that human genome contains not only protein-coding genes, but also tens of thousands non-protein coding genes express small long ncRNAs (non-coding RNAs). Rapid progress characterizing these identified a diverse range subclasses, which vary widely size, mechanism-of-action, share common functional theme regulating gene expression. play crucial many cellular pathways, including differentiation development cells organs and, when mis-regulated, number diseases. Increasing evidence suggests are major area evolutionary innovation an important determining phenotypic diversity animals.