Central Dogma Of Genetics Maybe Not So Central
NOVEMBER 8, 2010
Text messagers and computer gamers aren't alone in the willful misspelling department. RNA molecules do it too. RNA molecules aren't always faithful reproductions of the genetic instructions contained within DNA, a new study shows. The finding seems to violate a tenet of genetics so fundamental that scientists call it the central dogma: DNA letters encode information and RNA is made in DNA's likeness. The RNA then serves as a template to build proteins. But a study of RNA in white blood cells from 27 different people shows that, on average, each person has nearly 4,000 genes in which the RNA copies contain misspellings not found in DNA. "It's unbelievable," said Mingyao Li, PhD, assistant professor of Biostatistics, in Science News article, which also ran on Wired.com. Li presented the finding at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. An article also ran on Nature.com
