this is a really big deal and i am amused by the multiple google maps references. i was at a NIH workshop with the gentleman in the picture a few years ago (hi Mark Gerstein) and we talked about how google maps like visualizations can help spur discovery in science
i am glad faint echoes of that workshop led to something 🙂
“It’s Google maps”. Its predecessor, the Human Genome Project, which determined the entire sequence of human DNA, “was like getting a picture of earth from space. It doesn’t tell you where the roads are, it doesn’t tell you what traffic is like at what time of the day, it doesn’t tell you where the good restaurants are, or the hospitals or the cities or the rivers.”
The new result “is a stunning resource. My head explodes at the amount of data.”
“We don’t use that term anymore. It was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome — as if we knew enough to say it wasn’t functional.” Most of the DNA that scientists once thought was just taking up space in the genome, “turns out to be doing stuff.”
and techniques like LIGR-Seq can determine what that DNA does:
“Most researchers in the life sciences agree that there’s an urgent need to understand what ncRNAs do. This technology will open the door to developing a new understanding of ncRNA function”. Not having to rely on pre-existing knowledge will boost the discovery of RNA pairs that have never been seen before. Scientists can also, for the first time, look at RNA interactions as they occur in living cells, in all their complexity, unlike in the juices of mashed up cells that they had to rely on before. This is a bit like moving on to explore marine biology from collecting shells on the beach to scuba-diving among the coral reefs, where the scope for discovery is so much bigger. Actually, ncRNAs come in multiple flavors: there’s rRNA, tRNA, snRNA, snoRNA, piRNA, miRNA, and lncRNA, to name a few, where prefixes reflect the RNA’s place in the cell or some aspect of its function. But the truth is that no one really knows the extent to which these ncRNAs control what goes on in the cell, or how they do this.
These noncoding regions may be the source of de novo genes:
The mystery of where these orphan genes came from has puzzled scientists for decades. But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of non-coding DNA. “Genetic function somehow springs into existence. This metamorphosis was once considered to be impossible, but a growing number of examples in organisms ranging from yeast and flies to mice and humans has convinced most of the field that these de novo genes exist.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 