foreveryoung writes:
That same gene could be transcribed with other genes, and then spliced thousands of different ways to produce thousands of different miRNAs.
...
I didn't say any other proteins would be produced. I said micro RNAs would be produced. These micro RNAs are known to have regulatory function, mainly transcription regulation.
OK, so what microRNAs are associated with the
Cytochrome C gene sequence? Certainly microRNA exist and have regulatory functions, but what evidence is there that there is any association of microRNAs produced from Cytochrome C sequences in different species with different regulatory networks? This seem to be a pretty specific claim, is there actually any research that would support it or are you just making up
ad hoc explanations with a trendy hot topic term thrown in?
It seems a particularly specious argument that this is some sort of highly efficient system compressing more functions into one sequence when there are about 50 pseudogene forms of
Cytochrome C in the human genome.
So where are all these examples of protein coding gene sequences which also encode multiple functional microRNAs?
I am certainly aware of some examples of dual function microRNAs which both act as mediators of gene regulation in their RNA form and as templates for proteins (
Wadler and Vanderpool, 2007;
Gimpel et al., 2010;
Vanderpool et al., 2011), but these come nowhere near the extent you are suggesting and are all from bacteria.
There are some examples in the eukaryotes of RNAs from coding sequences which fulfill functional roles other than as templates for protein synthesis, but these roles are not as microRNAs (
Ulvelling et al., 2011). I am certainly onboard with the idea that other layers of information, regulatory and structural amongst others, can be encoded overlapping with protein coding sequences (Itzkovitz et al., 2010
PDF) and there are even instances of overlapping protein coding sequences, but I am unaware of the situation you suggest being a common one, as it would need to be for your explanation of the diversity of homologous genes to make sense.
TTFN,
WK
Edited by Wounded King, : added some spacing