The short and the long of UTRs

One of the revelations of the post-genomics era has been that that much more of the genome is transcribed than was previously imagined, and that ncRNAs rival protein coding transcripts in genomic abundance. A pre-mRNA splices out much non-coding – though not necessarily nonregulatory – RNA sequence, yet the mature messenger RNA often still retains a significant non-protein-coding RNA sequence that contains regulatory information relevant to the protein’s proper translation. Whilst the open reading frame contains a dense specification of protein function, the 5’ and 3’ untranslated regions (UTRs) may contain highly conserved sequences that interact with the cellular regulatory milieu to provide context specific regulation of translation.