Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 274

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 372 of the 372 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The central role of RNA in human development and cognition

Mattick, John S.·2011·FEBS Letters

Abstract

It appears that the genetic programming of humans and other complex organisms has been misunderstood for the past 50 years, due to the assumption that most genetic information is transacted by proteins. However, the human genome contains only about 20,000 protein‐coding genes, similar in number and with largely orthologous functions as those in nematodes that have only 1000 somatic cells. By contrast, the extent of non‐protein‐coding DNA increases with increasing complexity, reaching 98.8% in humans. The majority of these sequences are dynamically transcribed, mainly into non‐protein‐coding RNAs, with tens if not hundreds of thousands that show specific expression patterns and subcellular locations, as well as many classes of small regulatory RNAs. The emerging evidence indicates that these RNAs control the epigenetic states that underpin development, and that many are dysregulated in cancer and other complex diseases. Moreover it appears that animals, particularly primates, have evolved plasticity in these RNA regulatory systems, especially in the brain. Thus, it appears that what was dismissed as ‘junk’ because it was not understood holds the key to understanding human evolution, development, and cognition.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.febslet.2011.05.001

Cites

372 of 372 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 372 references

Cited by

See all 274

Metadata

Authors
Mattick, J. S.
Venue
FEBS Letters
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2011-05-06
Volume
585
Issue
11
Pages
1600-1616
ISSN
  • 0014-5793 (ISSN-L)
  • 1873-3468
OpenAlex
W2010012954
Cited by
274
References
372
FWCI
8.05
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The central role of RNA in human development and cognition. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.febslet.2011.05.001
The paper
Mattick, J. S. (2011). The central role of RNA in human development and cognition. FEBS Letters. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.febslet.2011.05.001

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.