Now Long Non-Coding RNA Makes Proteins: ENCODE 1, Dan Graur 0

It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature

It has become increasingly obvious that lncRNAs are functional but now Kristian Baker’s group has implicated them in encoding proteins, just like mRNA. As one report explains:

Previously, lncRNAs were thought to lack the information and capacity to encode for proteins, distinguishing them from the messenger RNAs that are expressed from known genes and act primarily as templates for the synthesis of proteins. Yet this team demonstrated that a subset of these lncRNAs is engaged by the translation machinery and can function to produce protein products

This means that Dan Graur’s doubling down last year (either our genome is mostly junk or evolution is false) is rapidly going the way of every other evolutionary prediction (and that would be down).

It’s not nice to bet against Mother Nature.