Penn Team Maps First Comprehensive Profile of Non-Protein-Coding RNAs to Provide Clinicians with New Way to Diagnose Array of Cancers
Growing insights about a significant, yet poorly understood, part of the genome – the “dark matter of DNA” -- have fundamentally changed the way scientists approach the study of diseases. The human genome contains about 20,000 protein-coding genes – less than 2 percent of the total – but 70 percent of the genome is made into non-coding RNA.