MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIE TY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC mAGAZiNe OF THe SOCie TY FOR SCieNCe & THe PUbLiC
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Turns out that ‘junk DNA’
wasn’t just talking trash
Not that many years ago, scientists
believed that most of the DNA in every
human cell was junk.
Genes — the segments of DNA carry
ing the instructions for building pro
teins — constitute only about 2 percent
of the chemicalunit letters in a human
cell’s complete set of chromosomes. All
the rest was thought to be unreadable by the cell’s machinery.
It would be like a newspaper in which only the headlines made
sense while the rest of the text was gibberish.
It turns out, though, that the cell can read nearly all the rest
of the DNA — it was the biologists who didn’t understand the
DNA language. “Noncoding” regions of DNA, once dismissed
as junk, do contain codes for making molecules; it’s just that
these molecules have jobs other than making proteins.
One important class of such molecules, called lincRNAs,
play all sorts of important roles in the cell, as Tina Hesman
Saey reports in this issue (Page 22). These RNAs have recently
joined a growing roster of other RNA molecules as interlopers
in the textbook story of how cells work. In the original fairy
tale, DNA segments called genes served as blueprints for mak
ing “messenger” RNA molecules that carried instructions to
the cell’s proteinmaking factories. Some of the proteins, in
turn, attached themselves to DNA at specific points to guide
which of the genes in a given cell made proteins and which
stayed dormant. Which genes were active drove the processes
that gave each cell its identity, and hence its job in the body.
But now it’s known that ragtag teams of RNA molecules —
some short, some long — also regulate what happens in a cell,
activating some genes and silencing others. DNA’s relation
ship with its RNA cousin is multifaceted; the neat textbook
charts listing genes, the proteins they encode and the jobs
those proteins do reflect humanfriendly labels for organiz
ing knowledge, not the reality of cellular biochemistry. This
new view suggests that people differ from other organisms,
from worms to flies to mice, not because of proteincoding
genes. It may be rather that species’ defining features arise
from diverse activities orchestrated by the multitude of RNA
molecules produced from the cell’s supposedly “junk” DNA,
as Stuart Knowling and Kevin Morris of the Scripps Research
Institute propose in a recent issue of the journal Biochimie.
“It is becoming clear,” Knowling and Morris write, “that
what was once considered the trash of the cell is becoming
treasure.” —Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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