Regulatory RNAs and the demise of junk DNA 英文参考文献.docVIP

Meeting report Regulatory RNAs and the demise of ‘junk’ DNA Frank J Slack Address: Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. Email: frank.slack@ Published: 28 September 2006 Genome Biology 2006, 7:328 (doi:10.1186/gb-2006-7-9-328) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2006/7/9/328 ? 2006 BioMed Central Ltd Transcription, transcription everywhere A report of the meeting ‘Regulatory RNAs’, the 71st Cold Whole-genome tiling microarrays offer a relatively unbiased Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology, Cold and sensitive approach to detecting rare transcripts and, Spring Harbor, USA, 31 May-5 July 2006. along with the sequencing of expressed sequence tags (ESTs), are providing ample evidence for an abundance of unsuspected transcription from mammalian genomes that A growing body of work suggests that genes for noncoding RNAs make up a substantial class of genes in all organisms, with increasing organismal complexity correlated with an increasing complexity of noncoding RNAs. Many of these non- coding RNAs appear to have regulatory functions and these were the subject of this year’s annual Cold Spring Harbor Symposium. Among the most exciting themes of the meeting were the evidence for significant amounts of hitherto undis- covered transcription in genomes and the discovery of novel classes of noncoding RNAs with thousands of members. In this report I review a few of these highlights. involves both protein-coding and noncoding sequences. Using tiling arrays, both Michael Snyder (Yale University, New Haven, USA) and Thomas Gingeras (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, USA) showed startling evidence for significantly more transcription from the human genome than was previously appreciated, much of it regulated. Snyder reported that there are at