Pseudogenes..doc

Pseudogenes Yusuf Tutar1,2,3 1Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Cumhuriyet University, 58140 Sivas, Turkey 2Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Cumhuriyet University, 58140 Sivas, Turkey 3CUTFAM Research Center, Faculty of Medicine, Cumhuriyet University, 58140 Sivas, Turkey Received 29 August 2011; Accepted 6 February 2012 Academic Editor: H. Heng Copyright ? 2012 Yusuf Tutar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Pseudogenes are ubiquitous and abundant in genomes. Pseudogenes were once called “genomic fossils” and treated as “junk DNA” several years. Nevertheless, it has been recognized that some pseudogenes play essential roles in gene regulation of their parent genes, and many pseudogenes are transcribed into RNA. Pseudogene transcripts may also form small interfering RNA or decrease cellular miRNA concentration. Thus, pseudogenes regulate tumor suppressors and oncogenes. Their essential functions draw the attention of our research group in my current work on heat shock protein 90: a chaperone of oncogenes. The paper reviews our current knowledge on pseudogenes and evaluates preliminary results of the chaperone data. Current efforts to understand pseudogenes interactions help to understand the functions of a genome. 1. History of Pseudogenes Sequencing human genome brought several debates about noncoding sequences. So what is the role of the noncoding parts since protein coding exons compromise only around two percent of the whole genome sequence? The noncoding regions are transposable elements, structural variants, segmental duplications, simple and tandem repeats, conserved noncoding elements, functional noncoding RNAs, regulatory elements, and pseudogenes [1]. Annotation of these noncoding regions through functional genomics and sequence a