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A new paper, published today in Science, identifies widespread differences between DNA sequences and their corresponding RNA transcripts in human cells, and demonstrates that these differences result in proteins that do not precisely match the genes that encode them.
The finding challenges the assumption that RNA is a perfect one-to-one match to its corresponding DNA sequence and may open the door to an unexplored area of variation in the human genome.
"Most people assume the information in DNA is faithfully transferred to RNA and then the RNA is translated into proteins," said Jin Billy Li, a geneticist at Stanford University who was not involved in the research. If additional research confirms the results, "the central dogma will have to be revised. You can't assume the ...
