Myriad RNAs and RNA-Binding Proteins Control Cell Functions, Explain Diseases, and Guide New Therapies.

This summary of the 84th Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Symposium on Quantitative Biology: RNA Control and Regulation, held in May 2019, highlights key emerging themes in this field, which now impacts nearly every aspect of biology and medicine. Recent discoveries accelerated by technological developments reveal enormous diversity of RNAs and RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) with ever-increasing roles in eukaryotes. Atomic structures and live-cell imaging of transcription, RNA splicing, 3'-end processing, modifications, and degradation machineries provide mechanistic insights, explaining hundreds of diseases caused by their perturbations. This great progress uncovered numerous targets for therapies, some of which have already been successfully exploited, and many opportunities for pharmacological intervention and RNA-guided genome engineering. Myriad unexplained RNAs and RBPs leave the RNA field open for many more exciting discoveries.