

Flaws emerge in RNA method to build tree of life - hachiya
http://www.nature.com/news/flaws-emerge-in-rna-method-to-build-tree-of-life-1.15625

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Groxx
> _For example, in the case of the turtle study, Peterson’s team had searched
> for microRNAs in RNA extracted from cells, rather than by sifting through
> the turtle genome — which was not available when they did the study. The
> discrepancy likely results from the fact that some pieces of RNA are only
> expressed at particular moments in an animal’s lifetime, whereas genes in
> the genome are steady._

Ouch. If micro-RNA is expressed differently at times, that seems like a rather
fatal flaw in using them for similarity measurements.

Maybe it's just hindsight, but it seems fairly obvious that RNA-that-controls-
gene-expression would vary through a lifetime, and therefore make it a
problematic source for measuring similarity. Unless they can detect and ignore
ones that come and go...?

