They discovered that there were individual and disparate stretches of DNA that appeared to be amplifying the genes' activity, escalating the process of messenger RNA and protein production. These bits of DNA, called "enhancer regions," were more often than not targeting their genes over vast genomic distances, like a computer dictating orders to a global digital network via satellite.

Most important, however, was the discovery that these enhancer regions accomplished this phenomenon by producing their own RNA molecules, and that these enhancer RNAs, or eRNAs, were intensifying the enzymatic processes that are essential for a gene's ability to create protein.

"Biologists have known about enhancers since 1980, and there has even been a paper or two describing RNA produced at enhancer regions, but it was largely considered an isolated curiosity," says Greenberg. "What we've discovered here is how widespread this phenomenon is. We've found that there are thousands of these enhancers, that they're spread throughout the genome, and that they are essential to the process in which experience results in new synaptic connections. What's more, we suspect that they're active in many other mammalian cell types, not just neurons."

It isn't clear yet precisely how these eRNAs accomplish their synaptic-building tasks, or even where they travel to within the neuron once they are produced. These are questions for further study. Still, the researchers believe there is a likelihood that these finding may eventually prove relevant to, and cast light on, our understanding of certain neurological and psychiatric disorders in which the regulation of gene activity plays a critical role.

Source: Harvard Medical School