Transcription: from regulatory ncRNA to incongruent redundancy.

Transcription is such a fundamental process and has been studied by so many for so long that skeptics might ask what more there is to learn. Those who attended the meeting summarized here on the dynamics of eukaryotic transcription during development were not disappointed. Studying the transcription of genes in stem cells during early development and in model organisms has illuminated mechanisms for transcriptional control that would have been hard to accept even 5 years ago, and consistently challenges the textbook view of transcriptional regulation.