Researchers found that the cephalopod is the only creature that can edit its RNA outside the nucleus.. now that his team knows that the squid has the cellular machinery to do this RNA editing, the next task is to understand why. He suspects it has something to do with allowing the squid to better adapt to changing environmental conditions such as water temperature.
Tag: dna
Noise Phenotype
All marbled crayfish which exist today derive from a single animal. They are all genetically identical. These aquatic clones actually vary quite a bit in their color, size, behavior and longevity. randomness in development may be just as important as genetic and environmental variation.
Noncanonical ORF
Using mass spectrometry, ribosome profiling, and several CRISPR-based screens, Chen et al. identified 100s of previously uncharacterized functional micropeptides in the human genome. Protein translation outside of annotated open reading frames (ORFs) in messenger RNAs and within ORFs in long noncoding RNAs is pervasive. A functional screen using CRISPR-Cas9 with single-cell transcriptomics suggested critical roles for 100s of micropeptides. Micropeptides encoded by multiple short, upstream ORFs form stable protein complexes with the downstream canonical proteins encoded on the same messenger RNAs. One of the particularly puzzling things is that we’re seeing proteins that have real functions but do not seem to be evolutionarily conserved. Noncoding RNA may actually be coding.
Genomic epidemiology
We believe this may have occurred by the WA1 case having exposed someone else to the virus in the period between Jan 15 and Jan 19 before they were isolated. If this second case was mild or asymptomatic, contact tracing efforts by public health would have had difficulty detecting it. After this point, community spread occurred and was undetected due to the CDC narrow case definition that required direct travel to China or direct contact with a known case to even be considered for testing. This lack of testing was a critical error and allowed an outbreak in Snohomish County and surroundings to grow to a sizable problem before it was even detected.
this is a great summary of the state of the art on using mutations to reconstruct how a disease spreads.
Non-breathing animal
They have lost their tissue, their nerve cells, their muscles, everything. And now we find they have lost their ability to breathe.
Sequencing the Oceans
small dna sequencers, combined with autonomous underwater drones, allowing for continuous sampling.
Ambigram Viruses
Occasionally, sections of a genome will have overlapping sequences that code for different proteins. But in narnaviruses, the entire genome is an overlapping sequence: It can be read in its “reverse complementary” orientation. That is, the RNA is like an ambigram, a stylized script that still says something when flipped upside down.
RNA-DNA chimeras
Origin-of-Life Study Points to Chemical Chimeras, Not RNA
research is beginning to show that starting with the right kind of mess is not only more realistic, but more effective at generating the materials vital to life, while also doing away with problems that have plagued purer systems. “There are times when we have mixtures, rather than just the isolated reactants that people typically use, and we get better results”. When mixtures are taken into consideration, the emergence of life on Earth in some ways “is not as hard as we might think it is.” What if the chimeric instability was, instead, secretly beneficial and offered a more natural way to get to a world of pure RNA and pure DNA right out of the gate?
Because the nucleic acids with mixed backbones formed weaker 2-strand systems, they didn’t succumb to the strand separation problem that prevented replication for pure RNA. Moreover, during their replication process, the RNA-DNA chimeras preferentially synthesized strands of pure RNA and pure DNA rather than new chimeric molecules — and they produced more of those pure compounds than pure nucleic acid templates did.
Most Controversial Tree
Is the genetically engineered chestnut tree an act of ecological restoration or a threat to wild forests?
Multipartite viruses
Some viruses can replicate without passing all their genes into any 1 cell.
A classical view in virology assumes that the viral replication cycle occurs within individual cells. But in the case of this “multipartite” virus, it seems that this is not true. The segments infect cells independently and accumulate independently in the plant host cells. It really shows that the virus doesn’t work at a single-cell level, but at a multicellular level.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 