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Molecular biology

The ends justify the means

Nature volume 497, pages 48–49 (2013)Cite this article

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A genomic analysis of yeast reveals that individual genes produce a rich complexity of RNA molecules with differing start and end sequences. The variation in these transcripts reflects the diversity of gene-regulation mechanisms. See Letter p.127

It seemed simple enough, the idea that one gene encodes one RNA transcript that is translated into one protein. But over the past 50 years, molecular biology has proven to be more complex than this 'central dogma', first proposed by Francis Crick in 19581. On page 127 of this issue, Pelechano et al.2 take transcript complexity to new ends, reporting nearly 2 million different RNA transcripts for a yeast genome that contains roughly 6,000 protein-encoding genesFootnote 1.

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Figure 1: Diversity of transcript isoforms.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion2 were published online on 24 April 2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. B. Franklin Pugh is in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16803, USA.,

    B. Franklin Pugh

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  1. B. Franklin Pugh
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Correspondence to B. Franklin Pugh.

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Pugh, B. The ends justify the means. Nature 497, 48–49 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12098

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