Ribogenomics: the science and knowledge of RNA

Abstract

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) deserves not only a dedicated field of biological research - a discipline or branch of knowledge - but also explicit definitions of its roles in cellular processes and molecular mechanisms. Ribogenomics is to study the biology of cellular RNAs, including their origin, biogenesis, structure and function. On the informational track, messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are the major component of ribogenomes, which encode proteins and serve as one of the four major components of the translation machinery and whose expression is regulated at multiple levels by other operational RNAs. On the operational track, there are several diverse types of RNAs - their length distribution is perhaps the most simplistic stratification - involving in major cellular activities, such as chromosomal structure and organization, DNA replication and repair, transcriptional/post-transcriptional regulation, RNA processing and routing, translation and cellular energy/metabolism regulation. An all-out effort exceeding the magnitude of the Human Genome Project is of essence to construct just mammalian transcriptomes in multiple contexts including embryonic development, circadian and seasonal rhythms, defined life-span stages, pathological conditions and anatomy-driven tissue/organ/cell types.

Keywords: Informational; Operational; RNA; Ribogenomics; Transcriptome.

Figure 1

Schematic view from genotype to phenotype with informational and operational tracks Ribogenomics in the context of a genotype-to-genotype view. Genotype becomes one of the deterministic factors that include ribogenomic, epigenomic, homoeostatic, compartmental and plastic tracks. For the sake of discussion, here we simply classify non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) into small ncRNAs (sncRNAs) and long ncRNAs (lncRNAs). To emphasize the influence of transcript-centric mutations, we identify expression-related simple nucleotide variations (eSNVs) as an important class of sequence variations that are not yet considered in the context of traditional population genetics and evolution.