Functional potential of genes: Pushing the boundaries of transcription
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - 13:13
in Biology & Nature
Like musicians in an orchestra who have the same musical score but start and finish playing at different intervals, cells with the same genes start and finish transcribing them at different points in the genome. For the first time, researchers have described the striking diversity of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that such start and end variation produces, even from the simple genome of yeast cells. Their findings shed new light on the importance of mRNA boundaries in determining the functional potential of genes.