RNA-Targeting CRISPR Reveals That Hundreds of Noncoding RNAs Are Essential—Not ‘Junk’
11th December 2024
Genes contain instructions for making proteins, and a central dogma of biology is that this information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. But only two percent of the human genome actually encodes proteins; the function of the remaining 98% remains largely unknown.
One pressing problem in human genetics is to understand what these regions of the genome do—if anything at all. Historically, some have even referred to these regions as “junk.”
Now, a study in Cell finds that some noncoding RNAs are not, in fact, junk—they are functional and play an important role in our cells, including in cancer and human development.
‘Junk’ DNA = DNA we haven’t yet figured out what it does.