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Transcriptomics

Illuminating the dark matter of the genome

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 8, pages 490–491 (2007)Cite this article

To assess the complexity of the human transcriptome, the authors profiled RNA populations by hybridization to tiling arrays covering the whole genome. Sixty-four percent of long (>200 nucleotides) polyadenylated RNAs that they identified remain unannotated. Short (<200 nucleotides) whole-cell RNAs correspond to 1.1% of the interrogated non-repetitive portion of the human genome; some tend to map antisense to splice junctions.

Although some RNAs (long and short) are nuclear or cytosolic, or both, most of transcribed nucleotides make up the nuclear, long RNAs. Sequence overlap between long and short RNA indicated that the latter might be processed from the former. Because the conserved portion of long RNAs extends beyond the overlapping short RNAs, as the authors say, this is “...reminiscent of the extended conservation seen in the miRNA precursors.”

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Kapranov, P. et al. RNA maps reveal new RNA classes and a possible function for pervasive transcription. 17 May 2007 Science (doi:10.1126/science.1138341)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Kapranov, P. et al. Genome-wide transcription and the implications for genomic organization. Nature Rev. Genet. 8, 413–423 (2007)

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Authors
  1. Magdalena Skipper
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Skipper, M. Illuminating the dark matter of the genome. Nat Rev Genet 8, 490–491 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2139

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