For decades, RNA molecules stitched together from two different genes were treated as evidence that something had gone wrong. Cancer is a disease of copying errors, and these hybrid transcripts looked like copying errors, so the field largely filed them under tumor biology.
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have described one that appears in healthy women, arises from the X chromosome that is supposed to be switched off, and tracks with how severely women get sick. Their findings were published in May in Science Advances.
