[ensembl-dev] Understanding Transcripts.

[Allan Kamau]

I am still struggling to understand the transcript data in relation to
a Gene, to simplify my preceding question, I would to ask.
1)Is a transcript strictly a pre-step to a variant of gene.
2)Is there a one to one relationship between a transcript and the
gene. A single transcript gets processed (in case of protein genes)
into a single gene and for RNA based genes the transcript may undergo
minimal processing to yield a single RNA based gene.

Allan.

On 6/4/12, Allan Kamau <kamauallan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am a non-biologist and I would like to get better understanding of a
> transcript in relation to a gene.
> According to a search on Ensembl, the gene "ENSG00000133997" reports
> that it has 11 transcripts and a listing of transcript_ids of these
> transcripts is provided. Some of the entries in this transcript
> listing have protein product ids and advises that "A protein coding
> transcript is a spliced mRNA that leads to a protein product" and the
> other entries are described as "No protein product" and have the text
> "Retained intronNoncoding transcript containing intronic sequence"
> along side them.
>
> My initial understanding was as follows (which I now think is wrong).
> One transcript is one mature mRNA which is composed of one or more
> exons observed to join together and have a polyA tail. And that this
> single transcript would be translated into a protein based gene. There
> could be several such transcripts (for different situations) all
> producing perhaps different protein products but each of these protein
> products is independently a variant of the the same gene to which
> these transcripts are known to yield.
>
> Or one transcript could be composed of an intron (is it possible to
> have multiple introns joined together) that would represent a single
> non-protein based (or simply RNA based) gene. And that there could be
> multiple such transcripts yielding the same gene (may have different
> structure but performs the same function).
> And that a gene may either be enzyme based or RNA based, which means
> that for a given gene we may not have transcripts representing mRNA
> and transcripts representing RNA gene products at the same time.
>
> Kindly advise.
>