Central Dogma of Genetics May Not Be So Central 196
Amorymeltzer writes "RNA molecules aren't always faithful reproductions of the genetic instructions contained within DNA, a new study shows (abstract). The finding seems to violate a tenet of genetics so fundamental that scientists call it the central dogma: DNA letters encode information, and RNA is made in DNA's likeness. The RNA then serves as a template to build proteins. But a study of RNA in white blood cells from 27 different people shows that, on average, each person has nearly 4,000 genes in which the RNA copies contain misspellings not found in DNA."
Central Dogma? (Score:3, Insightful)
Who do you think they are, Soulskill, NERV?
Also, science holds no dogma. If it does, it ceases to be science.
Conservative subs or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be interested to know how conservative these mistakes tend to be. If the mistakes generally replace amino acids with very similar ones it might be a programmed method of prodding just how much variation a structure can take while remaining functional. Weird and random events, which can be only so weird and so frequent before everything breaks entirely, are necessary for evolutionary adaptation, and these weird protein errors might be a previously unknown mechanism of exploring slightly different structures for proteins and seeing how far an organism can push the envelope.
No Surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
Central Dogma Barking Up Wrong Tree (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the big thing about this (if indeed it holds up) is that the fidelity is much, much lower than expected. It doesn't seem that the mRNAs are miscoding (although it's possible) it seems that the coding is being jiggered with by other factors.
However, this is a statistical analysis of a number of genomes and the original genome coding teams warns that the precision of the decode may not be enough to warrant TFA's (tentative) conclusion.
But it's interesting and exciting. Stay tuned. Beats politics.
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
That people have discovered that the intermediate step is also adjusted can hardly be called a shock.
Yes, it is a shock. The prevailing thought was that the RNA was transcribed faithfully and then that perfect transcript of the DNA was sliced up in strange ways. These people have discovered that the transcript may never have been perfect at all.
Imagine cutting up a loaf of bread: The geneticists were quibbling about how thick the slices were and how to arrange it on the plate, all without paying attention to what kind of bread they used. Now suddenly they've noticed that the recipe for french bread gave them a sourdough loaf while they aren't looking, and it may not be about the slicing as much as about how the right recipe is giving them the wrong thing to cut up.
Re:NEWS FLASH (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RTFA, the errors weren't random. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's kind of interesting, but not really amazing. Something must be causing the "mistakes" no matter how "random" they appear to be -- whether it's a virus, a stray cosmic ray or something else. The fact that it seems much less random than you'd expect just points to the likelihood that we'll soon get to the bottom of the phenomenon.
Re:Why is this news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that is very different. Not knowing why is indeed very interesting. The consequence of the misspellings depends on whether they ARE true misspellings versus data-driven modifications from non-encoding genetic material. If they are deliberate transforms, then to call them misspellings is flawed, since the spelling would then be precisely what the DNA coded for (when considering all other types of data). Likewise, when U is used in RNA, it is not considered a mis-spelling, even though that would not be the nucleotide in the DNA.
Now, there may well be consequences for non-encoded mis-spellings, and the consequences of those would be extremely interesting.
This, really, is where the interest should be.
Re:Central Dogma Barking Up Wrong Tree (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is NOT what the central dogma says (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Central Dogma? (Score:3, Insightful)
More like a dogma that the philosophy of science holds.
Re:Central Dogma? (Score:3, Insightful)