Right, my original plan was to post some new and exciting research in RNA...until I got some comments that I needed to explain my research to those more 'scientifically challenged'.

OK I can do that.

Lets start with the basics like the central dogma of life. (See the diagram below) I don’t know who came up with the name but it sounds cool for the textbooks so it kind of stuck. DNA is our famous double stranded genetic storage material, all our genes are there, ready to go. It is our cellular library of information. When a gene (or book) is needed proteins make a single stranded copy of the DNA (photocopy perhaps) which is then sent to the Ribosome (a cellular machinery made of RNAs and proteins) to be used as the blueprints for proteins…or so they said last century. However, many more discoveries were made that showed that some genes didn’t get turned into proteins, they functioned as RNAs.

The way they can do this has to do with blobs.  Proteins are essentially blobs of chemicals with a very defined 3D shape. This shape means that they can fit together in complexes, forming chemical bonds and breaking them. RNAs are also chemical blobs which can also fold into 3D shapes, can do the same sorts of things as proteins but not quite as efficiently. RNAs that can do catalytic reactions are sometimes called Ribozymes.

These early discoveries on non-coding RNAs (or ncRNAs) really opened a can of worms. In humans alone, there are many classes of RNAs of different sizes and shapes doing different functions. Short ones of about 21 nucleotides (strings consisting of nucleotide bases, Guanine (G), Adenine (A), Cytosine (C) and Thymine (T)), can interfere with other genes being translated into proteins, thus regulating them. Longer ones (100-200 nucleotides) bind with specific proteins and modify other RNAs chemically to control their function. Some very long ones have really important jobs in turning off that pesky spare X chromosome in females (we have two and do not need a double dose of ‘those’ enzymes).

There is a big RNA world out there hidden in the darkness of our cells. In other blogs I will go into some of these RNAs and how they work.

Further reading:

Good old Wikipedia has some good definitions and links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_RNA