Non-coding RNAs: A tale of junk turning into treasure
Abstract
Biochemists and molecular biologists, who have been in the field for a couple of decades, would probably remember the time when it was a norm to term all RNA ‘junk’ if it did not translate into a protein product. Gone are those days. The erstwhile ‘junk’ RNA is now a much pursued and sought entity. The RNA molecules that do not code for any proteins; the ‘non-coding RNAs’, are now a hot topic in modern day research. Many non-coding RNAs are very much functional in biological systems, and compensate for their inability to be translated into proteins through alternate mechanisms. As it turns out, the non-coding RNAs are quite abundant [1]. The sequencing of human genome at the turn of century, followed by recent advancements in the technical capabilities have resulted in a much better understanding of transcriptional landscape i.e. the fate of a majority of RNAs that are transcribed from human genome [2]. It is believed that three quarters of human genome is capable of being transcribed, which, simply speaking, is a lot of RNA. Only a tiny fraction (3%) of the genome consists of protein-coding genes [3] which means that a vast majority of genome gets transcribed into non-coding RNAs. While our knowledge on the subject is far from complete, by all estimates it can be concluded that the number of non-coding RNAs is much more than the ‘coding RNAs’ that get translated into proteins [3,4]. This immediately raises a red flag e after all, why these seemingly useless genome portions,…
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