Epigenetics in Health and Disease

6. Realm of non-coding RNAs: From bacteria to human

The central dogma of molecular biology has been “DNA makes RNA makes protein” for the past 50 or 60 years. The development of this postulate was largely influenced by the publication of an article by George Beadle and Edward Tatum (1941) describing genetic mutations in the mold Neurospora crassa. This work allowed Norman Horowitz to develop the “one gene-one enzyme hypothesis.” Although the assumption that each gene makes a protein might partially apply to unicellular prokaryotes, it is definitely far from being true for multicellular eukaryotes. For a long time, we used to believe that RNA molecules are intermediate messengers between a gene and the protein it encodes. Again, it was thought ...