Abstract
The central dogma of molecular biology has come under scrutiny in recent years. Here, we reviewed high-throughput mRNA and protein expression data of Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and several mammalian cells. At both single cell and population scales, the statistical comparisons between the entire transcriptomes and proteomes show clear correlation structures. In contrast, the pair-wise correlations of single transcripts to proteins show nullity. These data suggest that the organizing structure guiding cellular processes is observed at omics-wide scale, and not at single molecule level. The central dogma, thus, globally emerges as an average integrated flow of cellular information.
Highlights
The central dogma of molecular biology has come under scrutiny in recent years
The transcriptomewide mRNA-mRNA expression correlation between replicates of NIH/3T3 (Schwanhäusser et al, 2011) (Figure 2C) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Ward et al, 2008) cell population samples are both very high, with R2 > 0.9 (Table 1). Such strong correlations are observed between population samples for protein–protein expressions in NIH/3T3 cells (Schwanhäusser et al, 2011) (Figure 2D), Porphyromonas gingivalis (Xia et al, 2007) and Glycine max (Brandão et al, 2010) (Table 1). Since these data that compare same species yield very high correlations, it is conceivable that the sequential delay processes or different lifetimes are responsible for lowering the population level correlation structures between mRNA and protein expressions
The examples shown in this paper highlight the differences in the order of correlation values observed between species in the central dogma over cell populations and single cells
Summary
We reviewed high-throughput mRNA and protein expression data of Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and several mammalian cells At both single cell and population scales, the statistical comparisons between the entire transcriptomes and proteomes show clear correlation structures. The missing regulatory features, such as the DNA proofreading/repair mechanisms and alternative splicing of pre-mRNA, introduce several intermediary steps These additional steps interfere with the key steps of the dogma and likely alter the information dynamics. Other investigations reported errors or mismatches between RNA sequences and their coding DNA (Hayden, 2011; Li et al, 2011) Taken together, these data cast doubts on the validity of the central dogma in the context of present day science and, question the simplicity of linear information flow (DNA to RNA, and RNA to protein).
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