Searching for function in the dark matter of the genome
By
Dr. Eivind Valen
Researcher, Group leader
Department of Informatics
University of Bergen
While most of the genome is transcribed, only a fraction codes for proteins. The remaining non-coding transcripts have often been referred to as “the dark matter of the genome” and are largely uncharacterized. We found that long non-coding RNAs are highly regulated during zebrafish development: the majority is more temporally restricted than proteins and many display spatially regulated expression. Through integration with ribosome profiling we showed that computational annotation of coding potential is not always reliable and discovered several short peptides that have been previously annotated as non-coding, including one essential to development.