Genes contain instructions for making proteins, and a central dogma of biology is that this information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. But only two percent of the human genome actually encodes proteins; the function of the remaining 98 percent remains largely unknown. One pressing problem in human genetics is to understand what these regions of the genome do -- if anything at all. Historically, some have even referred to these regions as 'junk.' Now, a new study finds that some noncoding RNAs are not, in fact, junk -- they are functional and play an important role in our cells, including in cancer and human development.
