The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the discoverers of RNA interference, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello. This prize, which follows "RNA" Nobels for splicing and RNA catalysis, highlights just one class of recently discovered non-protein coding RNAs. Remarkably, non-coding RNAs are thought to outnumber protein coding genes in mammals by perhaps as much as four-fold. In fact, it appears that the complexity of an organism correlates with the fraction of its genome devoted to non-protein coding RNAs. Essential biological processes as diverse as cell differentiation,...

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the discoverers of RNA interference, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello. This prize, which follows "RNA" Nobels for splicing and RNA catalysis, highlights just one class of recently discovered non-protein coding RNAs. Remarkably, non-coding RNAs are thought to outnumber protein coding genes in mammals by perhaps as much as four-fold. In fact, it appears that the complexity of an organism correlates with the fraction of its genome devoted to non-protein coding RNAs. Essential biological processes as diverse as cell differentiation,...