Studying chromosome-wide transcriptional networks: new insights into disease?

A large amount of experimental data collected over the last decade has shown that genomic organization is very complex and has highlighted the fact that the current set of gene annotations does not fully capture this complexity. Much of the RNA detected in a cell is found to originate from outside the exons of annotated genes. Exons of annotated and unannotated transcripts separated by large genomic distances can be joined together in chimeric transcripts. Any given base-pair in a genome could be traversed by many protein-coding and non-coding RNAs. We discuss the implications of these effects for our understanding of disease.