User:Kinkreet/eRNA

Enhancer ribonucleic acid (eRNA) is a class of RNA molecules. Enhancer RNAs are distinct from the class of exosome-enriched RNAs, or extracellular RNAs, which also uses the abbreviation 'eRNA', although usually it is abbreviated as 'exRNA'.

History
Nucleic acids was first discovered in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss physician working in the lab of biochemist Felix Hoppe-Seyler, at the University of Tübingen. But it was not until 1958, with the discovery of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) during the 50's, which gave RNAs a definitive role in the cell. Crick's famous paper, On protein synthesis, implied that the role of the RNA was to encode information to produce proteins, and that DNA makes RNA which makes proteins. Thus, for about 7 years, the role of RNA was viewed to be coding for proteins. This is until 1965, when the structure of the first non-coding RNA, an alanine transfer RNA (tRNA) from baker's yeast, was published. tRNAs transfer amino acids to ribosomes, where they are matched according to the mRNA sequence, and added onto the nascent polypeptide chain in a process called translation. Subsequently, other non-coding RNAs have been discovered, such as ribosomal RNAs (rRNA), small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs), microRNAs (miRNAs), small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs), transfer-messenger RNAs (tmRNAs), telomerase RNA component (TERC), long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs), Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) plus many more. RNAs have now been shown to function in post-translational modifications, regulating gene expression, in the immune response, as well as processing other RNAs.