Evidence for common short natural trans sense-antisense pairing between transcripts from protein coding genes

Background There is increasing realization that regulation of genes is done partly at the RNA level by sense-antisense binding. Studies typically concentrate on the role of non-coding RNAs in regulating coding RNA. But the majority of transcripts in a cell are likely to be coding. Is it possible that coding RNA might regulate other coding RNA by short perfect sense-antisense binding? Here we compare all well-described human protein coding mRNAs against all others to identify sites 15-25 bp long that could potentially perfectly match sense-antisense.