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May 15, 2024

The RNA Revolution Is Changing Our Understanding of Biology

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Scientists have recently discovered thousands of active RNA molecules that can control the human body.

By Philip Ball

Thomas Gingeras did not intend to upend basic ideas about how the human body works. In 2012 the geneticist, now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, was one of a few hundred colleagues who were simply trying to put together a compendium of human DNA functions. Their ­project was called ENCODE, for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. About a decade earlier almost all of the three billion DNA building blocks that make up the human genome had been identified. Gingeras and the other ENCODE scientists were trying to figure out what all that DNA did.

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