Biologjia Online

Tracking down noncoding RNAs

Until relatively recently, RNA has taken a predominantly backstage role compared to protein in genome studies. However, this is changing dramatically with the discovery of a plethora of RNAs that do not act as messenger (mRNA), transfer (tRNA), or ribosomal (rRNA) RNAs (1–3). These noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) play a role in a variety of processes such as transcriptional regulation, chromosome replication, RNA processing and modification, and protein degradation and translocation. Even so, ncRNAs usually lack the statistical signals in their primary sequence (like ORFs and codon bias) that have been used to such great effect in the identification of novel protein encoding genes, making the task of systematically identifying new ncRNAs in genomes currently one of the most exciting challenges in computational biology. The work of Washietl et al. in this issue of PNAS (4) faces this challenge head on. Through an elegant use of structural properties of RNA, the authors present an efficient comparative genomics approach to identifying novel ncRNAs and related genomic elements that promises to significantly contribute to the burgeoning field of computational RNomics.

posted by Selfmaderadio @ 4:43 e pasdites