RNA chip on a platter

Source: University of Queensland

An RNA microarray chip developed by Dr Marcel Dinger and Professor John Mattick, from the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, has been licensed to life sciences technology giant Invitrogen.

The technology has been licensed through IMBcom, UQ's company for the commercialisation of intellectual property arising from research conducted at the IMB.

Products commercialised by Invitrogen will be based on a novel set of RNA probes that Dinger and Mattick have designed, which can uniquely identify tens of thousands of coding and non-coding RNA sequences.

This is the first time that one product has been able to identify both large numbers of protein-coding and non-coding RNAs.

"Every cell in the body contains a full set of genes, but different cells express different subsets," Mattick said.

In the past these genes were thought only to code mainly for proteins, via the production of messenger RNAs, but it is now evident that many other genes produce non-coding RNAs whose functions have yet to be determined.

"It appears that we have misunderstood the nature of genetic programming in humans and other complex organisms," he said. "Most of the genome is transcribed, mainly into non-coding RNAs, which appear to comprise a hidden layer of gene regulation whose full dimensions are just beginning to be explored.

"There is increasing recognition that these non-coding RNAs control various levels of gene expression in physiology and development, as well as in the brain."