New atlas of mRNA variants captures inner workings of the brain
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New atlas of mRNA variants captures inner workings of the brain
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By
March 11, 2021
A team led by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine has made a map identifying all the different RNA molecules that are derived from each gene in the brains of mice.
It is the first map that depicts this important layer of biological diversity, called isoform variation, by cell type and across brain regions for the whole genome, and it contributes to neuroscientists’ ambitious goal of an ultra-detailed atlas of the brain.
Isoform variation is a process that extends the versatility of DNA by enabling individual genes to give rise to multiple versions of a protein, each of which may have a different function. Genes, when active, are transcribed into RNA molecules, and isoform variation involves the dicing and splicing into alternate versions or isoforms of these RNA molecules, each corresponding to a distinct variant of a protein.