The central dogma of genetics could hardly be simpler: DNA makes RNA makes protein. Except that now this tidy picture of how genes work has been muddied by a mammoth investigation of human DNA.
It turns out that DNA generates far more RNA than the standard dogma predicts it should – even some “junk” DNA gets transcribed. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project has quantified RNA transcription patterns and found that while the “standard” RNA copy of a gene gets translated into a protein as expected, for each copy of a gene cells also make RNA copies of many…
