RISCy Business: MicroRNAs, Pathogenesis, and Viruses

Proteins serve important regulatory and effector functions inside cells. However, the recent discovery that plants and animals have thousands of genes that encode non-protein-coding (nc)RNAs has opened a new vista on RNA-mediated biology. NcRNAs include rRNA, tRNA, small nuclear (sn)RNA, small nucleolar (sno)RNAs, micro-(mi)RNAs, and some of the lesser known RNAs such as vault RNAs, Y RNAs, repeat-associated small interfering (rasi)-RNAs, and PIWI-interacting (pi)RNAs (reviewed in Ref. 1). Emerging data now suggest that whereas 2% of the human genome encodes for protein-coding RNAs, 60–70% of our DNA is transcribed into ncRNAs (2, 3).