Garikipati Venkata Naga Srikanth, Uchida Shizuka
Department of Emergency Medicine, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Dorothy M. Davis Heart Lung and Research Institute, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Noncoding RNA. 2021 May 11;7(2):31. doi: 10.3390/ncrna7020031.
It is now commonly accepted that most of the mammalian genome is transcribed as RNA, yet less than 2% of such RNA encode for proteins. A majority of transcribed RNA exists as non-protein-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) with various functions. Because of the lack of sequence homologies among most ncRNAs species, it is difficult to infer the potential functions of ncRNAs by examining sequence patterns, such as catalytic domains, as in the case of proteins. Added to the existing complexity of predicting the functions of the ever-growing number of ncRNAs, increasing evidence suggests that various enzymes modify ncRNAs (e.g., ADARs, METTL3, and METTL14), which has opened up a new field of study called epitranscriptomics. Here, we examine the current status of ncRNA research from the perspective of epitranscriptomics.
现在人们普遍认为，大多数哺乳动物基因组都转录为RNA，但这些RNA中只有不到2%编码蛋白质。大多数转录的RNA以具有各种功能的非蛋白质编码RNA（ncRNA）形式存在。由于大多数ncRNA种类之间缺乏序列同源性，因此很难像蛋白质那样通过检查序列模式（如催化结构域）来推断ncRNA的潜在功能。除了预测数量不断增加的ncRNA功能的现有复杂性之外，越来越多的证据表明，各种酶会修饰ncRNA（例如ADAR、METTL3和METTL14），这开辟了一个名为表观转录组学的新研究领域。在这里，我们从表观转录组学的角度审视ncRNA研究的现状。
