The article in question from ‘creationsafari’that announces “Genetics “Central Dogma” Dead” concedes that...
“It remains indisputable that DNA codes for proteins via messenger RNA, and that proteins perform the major structural and functional operations of the cell.”
The finding of massive amounts of regulatory RNA (the only actual scientific meat among the rhetorical straw men) raised this speculation by Patrick Barry author of ‘Genome 2.0’ as quoted by the article in creationsafari...
“In the established definition, a gene is a discrete region of DNA that produces a single, identifiable protein in a cell. But the functioning of a protein often depends on a host of RNAs that control its activity. If a stretch of DNA known to be a protein-coding gene also produces regulatory RNAs essential for several other genes, is it somehow a part of all those other genes as well?”
Hardly an overturning of the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. It is a very interesting finding and it is estimated that these regulatory elements that show evolutionary conservation between lineages like genes (indicating that they have function and are under selective constraint) make up as much of the human genome as the genes themselves (3%).
>>The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology is that DNA is the template for a messenger RNA molecule that codes for a protein.
Nice spin in your comment. But the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology asserted that DNA’s only use was to code for proteins, that each protein was a consecutive sequence on one rung of DNA’s double-helix structure, and that anything else in DNA is extraneous.
“The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred back from protein to either protein or nucleic acid.” - Crick, F. (1970): Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Nature 227, 561-563
The new paradigm dubbed “Genome 2.0” is that coding regions can be non-contiguous, overlapping stretches on both sides of the DNA helix, and the regulatory non-coding sequences are far more important than the coding regions. Consider the following from the article:
“Offering a radical new conception of the genome, Gingeras proposes shifting the focus away from protein-coding genes. Instead, he suggests that the fundamental units of the genome could be defined as functional RNA transcripts.”
There is no protein coding in the new definition. There is only “functional RNA transcripts”. The need for this new definition shows a severe breakdown in the original Central Dogma concept. And far from RNA transcripts being the tiny percentage of the genome that codes for protein:
“The results from ENCODE were even more striking. In the slice of DNA studied in that project, between 74 percent and 93 percent of the genome produced RNA transcripts.”