C O N T E N T SSee Also
DescriptionSince the completion of the human genome project, a great deal of work has been carried out on analysing the results of the sequencing project. It has become clear that only a small percentage of the genome actually encodes proteins. The remaining genomic content is currently a topic of great interest. Traditional ideas of "junk DNA" and gene Introns which serve no purpose are increasingly being challenged with newer theories and discoveries such as micro RNA's, antisense RNA's and other "non-coding" RNA's. The Transcriptome is the set of all mRNA molecules (or transcripts) in one or a population of biological cells for a given set of environmental circumstances. Therefore, unlike the genome, which is fixed for a given organism (apart from genetic polymorphisms), the transcriptome varies depending upon the context of the experiment. Transcriptomics depicts the expression level of genes, often using techniques capable of sampling tens of thousands of different mRNA molecules at a time (eg DNA microarrays). It must be noted that the level of a given gene's mRNA is not directly proportional to the level of that gene's protein. The complete protein complement of a system is referred to as its proteome. Studying the transcriptome remains an important part of researching the circuits of life (metabolome). A study of 158,807 mouse transcripts revealed that 4520 of these transcripts form antisense partners that are base pair complementary to the exons of genes (1). These results raise the possibility that significant numbers of "antisense RNA-coding genes" might participate in the regulation of the levels of expression of protein-coding mRNAs. LinksAttribution
1. Antisense Transcription in the Mammalian Transcriptome; RIKEN Genome Exploration Research Group and Genome Science Group (Genome Network Project Core Group) and the FANTOM Consortium: S. Katayama et al. in Science, Vol 309, Issue 5740, 1564-1566 , 2 September 2005. |
