Yale Researchers Find New RNA Structures 90
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ScuttleMonkey
from the micro-steps-for-mankind dept.
from the micro-steps-for-mankind dept.
Science Daily is reporting that researchers from Yale have discovered "very large RNA structures within previously unstudied bacteria that appear crucial to basic biological functions such as helping viruses infect cells or allowing genes to 'jump' to different parts of the chromosome." Ronald Breaker, professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale, stated that this would be equivalent to protein scientists finding a whole new class of enzymes. "The Breaker laboratory has used the explosion of DNA sequence information and new computer programs to discover six of the top twelve largest bacterial RNAs just in the last several years. One of the newly discovered RNAs, called GOLLD, is the third largest and most complex RNA discovered to date, and appears to be used by viruses that infect bacteria. Another large RNA revealed in the study, called HEARO, has a genetic structure that suggests it is part of a type of 'jumping gene' that can move to new locations in the bacterial chromosome."
Re:RNA world (Score:2, Insightful)
If viruses are technically not alive, then what made the RNA world 'creatures' technically alive?
My vote is that life is not white and black like most things out here.
Viruses are closer to life than... most of the rocks we know.
Re:RNA world (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Curious choice of analogies (Score:5, Insightful)
Back to the car.... Hmmm.... OK - the RNA World hypothesis states that the first nucleic acid (the chemical responsible to for transmitting genetic information) was RNA. Breaker's hypothesis is that if that is the case, one should find RNA-based control structures somewhere since they are ancestral and nature loves to preserve ancestral things (don't recreate the wheel very often and if you do, keep a copy of the old wheel stashed somewhere).
He did find evidence of this in the coenzyme that helps vitamin B12 activity (see the previous link). So, perhaps these new RNA molecules have some sort of control function.
So, it's like finding a whole class of levers and rods that allow your car to do things when you were expecting that buttons and switches did all of the work.
Does that help?
Re:RNA world (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yale Evolution and Behaviour Lectures (Score:0, Insightful)
If you're a Global Warming skeptic you'll be interested in Professor Stearns suggestion that human induced global warming has the potential for an extinction event on par with the one that drove the extinction of the dinosaurs
Why would I be interested in that? The potential consequences of a proposition have nothing at all to do with the proposition's plausibility?
It's statements like yours that give AGW advocates a bad name: making the debate about the consequences rather than the evidence.
The evidence is mixed: a recent paper that compared temperatures at half a dozen stations world-wide over the better part of the 20th century showed no evidence for warming and contradicted model predictions for those locations; on the other hand ocean temperatures do seem to be increasing. On the computer modelling side, GCMs are in general unphysical and too highly parameterized to give plausible extrapolations from fitting past data, and no robust estimators of future climate exist.
The public policy questions around AGW depend on the consequences, but the quality of the science--which is unequivocally ambiguous--does not. So those of us who are interested in the science need to be careful to forget all about the consequences when evaluating the evidence. Otherwise the possibility of contaminating our reasoning with unrelated matters is far too high.
Re:RNA world (Score:3, Insightful)
Metabolism. RNA vs. DNA isn't the distinguishing factor.
I do agree though that there is a gray area between alive and not alive.
Re:RNA world (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is in the definition. In biology, there are plenty of concepts that are not binary (speciation is another tricky one). It's better to define life as a sliding scale than as a line in the sand. But this is nothing new. Since the discovery of symbiosis, and in particular parasitism, where we have organisms that may not have all the features of a fully independent living organism, it's been clear that you cannot define life in binary terms.
Re:Yale Evolution and Behaviour Lectures (Score:4, Insightful)
I nominate this extraordinary bit of rubbish for Non Sequitur of the Year. I'd like to think it's a bit of satire, if for no other reason than I need to believe in the fundamental decency and intellectual rigor of humanity.
Re:Yale Evolution and Behaviour Lectures (Score:5, Insightful)
Global warming pseudo-skeptics are a lot like a kid throwing lit matches in their livingroom, insisting the fires are quite natural and have no correllation with the flaming sticks he's tossing around.
Re:From the original Nature article... (Score:3, Insightful)
It amazes me just how much of a hack life seems to be at times. Stuff like this doesn't surprise me at all any more.
I began to realize how much of a hack life was when I first learned about HOK and SOK [wikipedia.org]. It is a remarkably simple and brutally efficient way of keeping a plasmid around - if it weren't for the fact that the plasmid actually has some benefits it would be the ultimate selfish gene. :)