Olejar Books

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the discoverers of RNA interference, highlighting just one example of a large number of recently discovered non-protein coding RNAs that are thought to outnumber protein coding genes in eukaryotes, for example, by several-fold. It appears that the complexity of organisms is correlated with the fraction of their genome that encodes non-protein coding RNAs. Essential biological processes as diverse as cell differentiation, suppression of infecting viruses and parasitic transposons, higher-level organization of eukaryotic chromosomes, and gene expression itself are found to largely be directed by non-protein coding RNAs. The biophysical study of these RNAs is an emergent field that has begun to unravel the molecular underpinnings of how RNAs fulfill their multitude of roles in sustaining cellular life. The resultant understanding of the physical and chemical processes at the molecular level is critical to our ability to harness RNAs for use in biotechnology and human therapy, a prospect that has recently spawned a multi-billion dollar industry.