RNA Takes Over
7th December 2021
One of the examples that I use to show how much we’ve learned about biology (and how much we didn’t know, even in the relatively recent past) is RNA. Who could have predicted that there would turn out to be so many different kinds of the stuff? We all grew up hearing about the basics in school – messenger RNA, transfer RNA, ribosomal RNA if your introductory course got fancy. But short hairpin RNA? Double-stranded RNA? Long noncoding RNA? Circular RNA? MicroRNA? I know that I’m leaving some out, but I’m also sure that there are others that belong on that list that we haven’t even stumbled across yet. Either we don’t know where to look, or how to look (because our existing techniques might not pick them up), or we don’t understand what we’re looking at even if we come across them. And I don’t mean to give the idea that the classes above are all figured out, either. We’re just starting to get the first ideas about what some of these things do in the cell, and how they relate to health and disease. Scientists of 2060 or so will look back on us with some pity, because of all the important things that we just didn’t know yet back in the 2020s.