What is reverse translation?

Answer

Dear Anke,

Your question has been unanswered here for a while, so I’ll give it a try.

The central dogma shows how information contained in our DNA is converted into workable proteins. You may not be familiar with terms such as replication (DNA to DNA), transcription (DNA to RNA) and translation (RNA to protein).

In theory you could think that there is always a road in the opposite direction. RNA to DNA or reverse transcription has already been established in viruses (eg HIV) and this technique is often used in vitro to make RNA corresponding DNA. This is of course not always what the DNA would have looked like originally, because often (certainly in eukaryotes) there are also pieces of DNA in the coding gene that will not be part of the mRNA that is transcribed from it (introns). These introns are “deleted” from the RNA after transcription, and the parts of RNA that do end up in the mRNA are stuck together by splicing.

Reverse translation, from protein to RNA, is somewhat less evident and to my knowledge does not occur in nature (or has not yet been described). If you know that there are 64 mRNA codons for the 20 amino acids that occur in proteins, this means that several codons can code for the same AZ (or stop) during translation. Conversely, this makes it difficult to construct a correct mRNA sequence from an AZ sequence. After all, there are several possibilities. However, the use of reverse translation has already been considered. On the one hand, this is already happening theoretically in bioinformatics, where attempts are made to generate a coding piece of RNA from protein and possibly subsequently DNA on the basis of AZ sequences alone. This only happens in silico and takes into account all kinds of known preconditions. On the other hand, research is already underway into how it might be biologically possible to allow reverse translation to continue, and there are hypotheses and models for this. Attached you will find an article about this.

So you notice that the opposing directions within the central dogma are researched and even used, but that it cannot always lead perfectly back to the real origin.

Hopefully this has helped you further.
Greetings,
Dries