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First published online April 20, 2007
Journal of Experimental Biology 210, 1526-1547 (2007)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2007
doi: 10.1242/jeb.005017

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Review Article

A new paradigm for developmental biology

John S. Mattick

ARC Centre for Functional and Applied Genomics, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia

e-mail: j.mattick{at}imb.uq.edu.au

Accepted 19 February 2007

It is usually thought that the development of complex organisms is controlled by protein regulatory factors and morphogenetic signals exchanged between cells and differentiating tissues during ontogeny. However, it is now evident that the majority of all animal genomes is transcribed, apparently in a developmentally regulated manner, suggesting that these genomes largely encode RNA machines and that there may be a vast hidden layer of RNA regulatory transactions in the background. I propose that the epigenetic trajectories of differentiation and development are primarily programmed by feed-forward RNA regulatory networks and that most of the information required for multicellular development is embedded in these networks, with cell–cell signalling required to provide important positional information and to correct stochastic errors in the endogenous RNA-directed program.

Key words: non-coding RNA, intron, regulation

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