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The RBPome: where the brains meet the brawn

2014; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1186/gb4153

1465-6914

Naomi Attar,

RNA modifications and cancer

Old friends Recent celebrations of the double helix, on the 60 anniversary of its discovery, heralded DNA as the key to life: the universal set of instructions for all organisms, the ubiquitous stuff of inheritance, without which our planet would be sterile. Although Genome Biology was among the culprits of this DNA-centric effervescence [1,2], our focus on DNA within the context of life as we know it belied the widely supported hypothesis that DNA has not always been integral to life, and that life’s earliest forms existed in a pre-DNA world. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s double helical structure, devised a schema with which you will undoubtedly be familiar known as the Central Dogma, in which information flows from DNA to RNA to protein (but see [3] for an updated version). Of these three molecules, it is very likely that DNA is the new kid on the block, a crouton freshly added to the primordial soup. By contrast, the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis holds that RNA is the oldest extant genetically encoded macromolecule, and that it coexisted with proteins and, prior to that, amino acids and peptides before DNA arrived on the scene. And so there we have it, RNA and proteins are old friends, who have learned to live intertwined with one another for longer than either has with DNA. By the nature of evolution, the co-dependency of these two molecules at the very early stages of life means that many of their interactions have become embedded in the fabric of the cell’s most critical processes, inherited by the DNA world from its RNA predecessor. Famous examples of course include protein translation, through the ribosome, and RNA splicing, through the spliceosome (but see [4] for a dissenting, or at least more nuanced, view). For such old friends, however, the interface where RNA and RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) meet ‘the RBPome’ remains remarkably unexplored, even though the more we search for RNA–protein interactions, the more we find them. This thematic issue of Genome