ABSTRACT
For many years, genomes and proteomes were regarded as the basis of life until the breakthrough at the end of the last century by Fire et al. (1998) in Caenorhabditis elegans, with a crucial and pioneering contribution in the fi eld of biology. It was, indeed, a revival of an early idea proposed by Jacob and Monod in the form of hypothesis that RNA molecules are regulators of gene expression wherein they interact with operators and affect transcriptional and post-transcriptional stages of gene expression. In the modern RNA world, many non-coding RNAs are gaining importance as they are delineated to be involved in gene regulation by sequence specifi c silencing in a phenomenon termed as RNA interference (RNAi).
