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Functional genomics

Non-coding transcripts — more than meets the eye

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 6, page 347 (2005)Cite this article

Although it has been shown that non-coding regions are transcribed into stable cytosolic RNAs during development, little is known about their real number. The report by Cheng et al. has just revealed that unannotated, non-polyadenylated transcripts comprise a large proportion of the transcriptional output of the human genome.

In an attempt to map the sites of transcription for cytosolic RNAs with polyadenylation (poly-A) tails, the authors used 25-mer oligonucleotides spaced every 5 bp — which provided a seven-fold increase in resolution over previous studies — and identified, on average, 18,694,360 nucleotides that were transcribed as cytosolic polyadenylated RNAs in 8 cell lines. Taking this a step further, they combined the rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) technique with high-density arrays to take a closer look at the 'junk' genomic regions of 10 human chromosomes.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Cheng, J. et al. Transcriptional maps of 10 human chromosomes at 5-nucleotide resolution. Science 24 March 2005 (10.1126/science.1108625)

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Authors
  1. Ekat Kritikou
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Affymetrix transcriptome project

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Kritikou, E. Non-coding transcripts — more than meets the eye. Nat Rev Genet 6, 347 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1611

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