Institute of Cell Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3JR, UK.
Curr Biol. 2012 Jun 5;22(11):R432-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.04.025.
June 27, 1970 was a significant day for our understanding of both the flow of information in biological systems and the evolution of eukaryotic genomes as this was the day that Nature published back-to-back papers reporting the discovery of an enzyme that copies RNA into DNA. This soon became known as reverse transcriptase and the RNA tumour viruses in which it was detected were renamed retroviruses. The realisation that retroviruses can convert their genomic RNA into DNA provided a route by which they could integrate into the chromosomes of infected cells as Howard Temin and his colleagues had proposed some years earlier. At the time it was thought that the ability to copy RNA into DNA would be confined to retroviruses. One of the more startling outcomes of whole genome DNA sequencing has been the discovery that eukaryotes can have more reverse transcriptase genes than genes coding for any other protein, and that the largest single component of many eukaryotic genomes has been generated by reverse transcription.
1970 年 6 月 27 日，对我们理解生物系统中的信息流和真核基因组的进化来说，是具有重要意义的一天。这一天，《自然》杂志连续发表了两篇论文，报告了一种能将 RNA 复制成 DNA 的酶的发现。这种酶很快被称为逆转录酶，在其中检测到的 RNA 肿瘤病毒也被重新命名为逆转录病毒。逆转录病毒可以将其基因组 RNA 转化为 DNA 的这一发现，为它们提供了一种整合到感染细胞染色体中的途径，正如霍华德·特明（Howard Temin）和他的同事几年前所提出的那样。当时，人们认为将 RNA 复制成 DNA 的能力将仅限于逆转录病毒。全基因组 DNA 测序的一个更惊人的结果是，真核生物拥有的逆转录酶基因比任何其他蛋白质编码基因都多，而且许多真核生物基因组的最大单一组成部分是通过逆转录产生的。
