Daniel Smith
Posts: 970
Joined: Sep. 2007
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More confirmation:
From the paper, "Unbiased Mapping of Transcription Factor Binding Sites along Human Chromosomes 21 and 22 Points to Widespread Regulation of Noncoding RNAs"
link
| Quote | | To further explore properties of the transcriptome and to identify functional attributes of the noncoding transcripts, binding sites for a collection of transcription factors have been mapped along chromosomes 21 and 22 in an unbiased approach, as a means of identifying possible regulatory regions for a wide variety of cellular RNAs. Interestingly, only 22% of the transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) are located at the canonical 5? termini of well-characterized protein-coding genes, while 36% lie within of immediately 3? to well-characterized genes and are significantly correlated with noncoding RNAs. A number of these noncoding RNAs are regulated in response to retinoic acid stimulation, and coregulation of overlapping pairs of protein-coding and noncoding RNAs occurs at a frequency significantly greater than chance. These data point to evidence that protein coding and noncoding genes have similar functional attributes regarding (1) the existence of common transcription factors in their promoter regions and (2) their ability to respond to environmental and developmental conditions, which together suggest that that they may be controlled by the same transcriptional regulatory machinery. These functional attributes argue against the idea that these noncoding RNAs merely represent transcriptional noise, but instead suggest that they may have biological functions. (my emphasis) |
And... | Quote | | Additionally, overlapping novel transcripts from the genes encoding nuclear protein UBASH3A (Supplemental Figures S2A and S2B), phosphatidylinositol transfer-like protein SEC14L2 (Supplemental Figures S2C and S2D), TBC/rabGAP domain protein EPI64 (Supplemental Figures S2E and S2F), guanine-nucleotide exchange factor TIAM1 (Supplemental Figures S2G and S2H), KIAA0376 protein (Supplemental Figures S2I and S2J), and GTSE1 (Supplemental Figures S2K and S2L) were verified by RT-PCR and/or Northern blot analyses (Supplemental Figure S3). In many of these cases, the TFBS that are located on the 3? end of the well-characterized gene appear to be located 5? of the overlapping novel transcript, which suggests that these transcripts may be regulated by these factors and in precisely the same way as protein coding genes. (my emphasis) |
So not only is the myth of "junk DNA" being systematically shattered, but they are also finding evidence that coding and non-coding sequences not only overlap each other, but also share regulatory factors.
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"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance." Orville Wright
"The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question." Richard Dawkins
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