The paper:
The FANTOM Consortium and RIKEN, "The transcriptional landscape of the mammalian genome," Science, 309:1559-63, 2005. (Cited in 251 papers)
The finding:
Techniques such as cap-analysis gene-expression and gene-identification signature technology allowed a group led by Yoshihide Hayashizaki at the RIKEN Institute in Wako, Japan, to look more in-depth at the mouse transcriptome. The team identified more than 180,000 RNA transcripts, which varied extensively based on alternative splicing and other modifications. Grouping these sequences into 44,000 transcript groups, they found that more than half did not code for proteins.
The significance:
The large variation in transcript modifications suggests that "mammalian genome RNA output is much more complex that previously thought," writes coauthor Piero Carninci in an E-mail. The study was "really the first" to start explaining how such complex mammalian systems can be encoded by so few genes, says Merete Fredholm of the University of Copenhagen.
The companion study: ...
