Fig 2.

Illustration of the relationship between ncRNAs and mRNAs with an academic biomedical department as an analogy. Our genome assigns only 1.5% of its sequence to mRNAs that encode proteins, which conduct cellular functions and thus resemble the cellular counterpart of the blue-collar working class. The remaining 98.5% of the genome is non-coding but is also transcribed to RNAs as regulators of cellular functions, mainly via control of mRNAs, thus resembling the white-collar class. In a biomedical department, most scientific achievements, with their various rewards, are credited to professors, with the tiny leftover credited with acknowledgements (such as diplomas) to those graduate students, postdocs or technicians who are the academic counterpart of the blue-collar working class employed and told by the professors to produce the actual data in the labs or animal rooms. Therefore, those who provide the direction are considered more important than those who provide the labor. Today the main focus of the biomedical fraternity is still on proteins as before, but it is probably time to shift more attention to the governing 98.5%.