Tutar Yusuf
Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Cumhuriyet University, 58140 Sivas, Turkey.
Comp Funct Genomics. 2012;2012:424526. doi: 10.1155/2012/424526. Epub 2012 May 7.
Pseudogenes are ubiquitous and abundant in genomes. Pseudogenes were once called "genomic fossils" and treated as "junk DNA" several years. Nevertheless, it has been recognized that some pseudogenes play essential roles in gene regulation of their parent genes, and many pseudogenes are transcribed into RNA. Pseudogene transcripts may also form small interfering RNA or decrease cellular miRNA concentration. Thus, pseudogenes regulate tumor suppressors and oncogenes. Their essential functions draw the attention of our research group in my current work on heat shock protein 90: a chaperone of oncogenes. The paper reviews our current knowledge on pseudogenes and evaluates preliminary results of the chaperone data. Current efforts to understand pseudogenes interactions help to understand the functions of a genome.
假基因在基因组中普遍存在且数量众多。假基因曾被称为“基因组化石”，并在过去几年被视为“垃圾DNA”。然而，人们已经认识到一些假基因在其亲本基因的基因调控中发挥着重要作用，并且许多假基因会转录成RNA。假基因转录本也可能形成小干扰RNA或降低细胞内miRNA浓度。因此，假基因可调控肿瘤抑制基因和癌基因。它们的重要功能引起了我们研究小组在我目前关于热休克蛋白90（一种癌基因伴侣）的研究工作中的关注。本文综述了我们目前对假基因的认识，并评估了伴侣数据的初步结果。目前了解假基因相互作用的努力有助于理解基因组的功能。
