Small Rnas Make The Cut

摘要

Two papers in this issue reveal the prevalence of cryptic or hidden transcription in the yeast genome. Cryptic unstable transcripts (CUTs) are a major class of RNA polymerase II transcripts in budding yeast and are degraded immediately after being synthesized. They had therefore escaped detection until recently. In the current papers, high-resolution genome analyses reveal that CUTs arise predominantly from promoter regions and in an antisense direction. There is therefore a widespread occurrence of inherently bidirectional promoters in yeast, which hints at a regulatory function for these non-coding transcripts.