Biological Dark Matter is the unclassified or poorly understood genetic material. About 20 years ago, scientists celebrated the first draft of sequenced human genomes. At that time, they predicted that humans had 25K to 40K genes that code for proteins, but now it seems to have 19K such genes expressed by a mere 1-2% of the genome. The remaining 98-99% of DNA do not do that, referred to as dark matter. However, scientists now estimate that over 10-20 % of dark matter in our genome does have specific functions. There are hundreds of thousands of functional regions in the human genome whose task is to control gene expression, thus acting as a regulatory gene. The most recent advance for figuring out how our genome’s dark matter works in respect to non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). It has been found by the research team at the University of Bern, that inhibiting the production of certain long noncoding RNAs (#lncRNAs) inhibit cell division in cancer cells. Hence, understanding dark matter, especially lncRNA could unlock the mechanisms of diseases and would provide a chance to treat them using Gene Editing Technology.
Reference:
Esposito R, Polidori T, Meise DF, Pulido-Quetglas C, Chouvardas P, Forster S, Schaerer P, Kobel A, Schlatter J, Kerkhof E, Roemmele M, Rice ES, Zhu L, Lanzós A, Guillen-Ramirez HA, Basile G, Carrozzo I, Vancura A, Ullrich S, Andrades A, Harvey D, Medina PP, Ma PC, Haefliger S, Wang X, Martinez I, Ochsenbein AF, Riether C, Johnson R. Multi-hallmark long noncoding RNA maps reveal non-small cell lung cancer vulnerabilities. Cell Genom. 2022 Aug 22;2(9):100171. doi: 10.1016/j.xgen.2022.100171. PMID: 36778670; PMCID: PMC9903773.
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