Nostalgia for a Simpler Time

The past two years, Sandra Porter blogs, have changed how people view the genome, particularly concerning how the genome is assembled and how that information is translated to become proteins. She used to think that structural variations weren't so common, but now there are more structural variations "than we would have ever expected," she writes. Also, the old conventional wisdom said that to get a gene expressed, the DNA of that gene was copied into RNA, and that would be sent to the ribosome to be made into protein with the help of three RNAs. "Now … everywhere you look there's some new kind of RNA with some unknown kind of function," Porter says, adding that new technologies are forcing people to look at the world in a new way.