As most Sandwalk readers know, The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology says,
... once (sequential) information has passed into protein it cannot get out again (F.H.C. Crick, 1958)
The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred from protein to either protein or nucleic acid. (F.H.C. Crick, 1970)You might wonder how you can quantify the idea that once information gets into protein it can't flow back to nucleic acids. You can't, of course.
The authors are referring to the standard scheme of information flow from DNA to RNA to protein. This is often mistakenly referred to as the Central Dogma by those scientists who haven't read the original papers. In this case, the authors of the Science article are asking whether the levels of protein in different cells are mostly controlled at the level of transcription, translation, mRNA degradation, or protein degradation.
The question might seem a little silly since the answer is "transcription." When a gene is not transcribed there is no protein and when it is transcribed you get protein. This has been known since Jacob and Monod. There are some exceptions but regulation of gene expression is predominantly at the level of transcription initiation.
Surprisingly, recent papers have claimed that once a gene is transcribed the final levels of protein are mainly regulated at the level of translation. The purpose of this little review is to point point out that recent work has called those result into question. Apparently the earlier papers didn't handle their statistics correctly!
New experiments, and a reevaluation of previous experiments, suggest that transcription is the main process that regulates protein levels in different cells. This is not a surprise.
Now that sanity has been restored, do you think we could teach these scientists about the Central Dogma?
Not holding my breath.
Crick, F.H.C. (1958) On protein synthesis. Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. XII:138-163.
Crick, F. (1970) Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Nature 227, 561-563. [PDF file]