The central dogma of molecular biology states that genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein — DNA to DNA by replication, DNA to RNA by transcription, RNA to protein by translation — with protein as the terminal expression of encoded information. Subsequent discoveries extend and in part contradict this unidirectional scheme: reverse transcription, in which reverse transcriptase synthesizes complementary DNA from an RNA template so that information moves from RNA back to DNA; RNA viruses, whose RNA genomes are used directly as messenger RNA or as templates for further RNA prior to translation; noncoding RNA, functional RNA molecules that act in the cell without ever being translated into protein; and epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in gene activity that arise without alteration of the underlying DNA sequence. The concept belongs to molecular biology and genetics, and it reframes the central dogma as a dominant pathway rather than an exhaustive law of information flow.
The central dogma of molecular biology states that genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein — DNA to DNA by replication, DNA to RNA by transcription, RNA to protein by translation — with …