Genes contain instructions for making proteins, and a central dogma of biology is that this information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. But only two percent of the human genome actually encodes proteins; the function of the remaining 98 percent remains largely unknown.

One pressing problem in human genetics is to understand what these regions of the genome do—if anything at all. Historically, some have even referred to these regions as “junk.”

Now, a new study in Cell finds that some noncoding RNAs are not, in fact, junk—they are functional and play an important role in our cells, including in cancer and human development. Using CRISPR technology that targets RNA instead of DNA, researchers at New York University and the New York Genome Center searched across the genome and found nearly 800 noncoding RNAs important for the function of diverse human cells from different tissues.

MIT researchers developed theoretical foundations for methods that could identify the best way to aggregate genes into modules and efficiently learn the underlying cause-and-effect relationships among them. This approach holds promise for investigating the mechanisms of diseases and identifying new drug targets.