ScienceIndex_ : Oxida... ScienceIndex_ : Isola... ScienceIndex_: An En... ScienceIndex_ : Prima... ScienceIndex_ : Relat... ScienceIndex_ : The m... Esciencenews : Researchers achieve RNA in... NatureBlogs : RT @m_m_campbell: Ironing... Physorg_com : Researchers achieve RNA in... ScienceIndex_ : IL-6... NatureBlogs: Dissolved iron may have be... Dissolved iron may have been key to RNA-based life.
Iron now locked in ancient rock formations may have once enabled an 'RNA world'. More than three billion years ago, in the primordial soup that was the cradle of life on Earth, RNA took on many of the roles that its sister molecule DNA fills today — or so some scientists have speculated. A paper published 31 May in PLoS ONE posits one way that such an ‘RNA world’ could have worked: by making use of iron, a common element in the watery environs of ancient Earth.
In an RNA-dominated world, “RNA would have been the genetic material, and would have been the primary enzyme in metabolism,” says Loren Dean Williams, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a co-author on the paper. Today, RNA is best known as the messenger of genetic information, but large RNA molecules can fold into more complex structures, called ribozymes, with the ability to cut or glue other RNAs together.
“We’re used to our world of oxygen, and oxygen and iron is just a terrible combination. ScienceIndex_ : Intra... Esciencenews : On early Earth, iron may h... Sciencedaily : Chemical substitution: On... Physorg_com : On early Earth, iron may h... Sciencescape : RT @Jen_Angela: Reducing s... ResearchBlogs : A dual purpose RNA and Hox... A dual purpose RNA and Hox regulation. A new paper in Plos Genetics shows that a long non-coding RNA regulates the expression of a Hox gene in Drosophila in cis. This finding suggests an explanation for the co-linearity displayed by Hox genes between genomic arrangement and expression pattern. The Ultrabithorax mutant. Hox genes are master-regulators of positional identity along the anterior-posterior axis throughout bilaterian animals.
Hox genes are found in genomic clusters in which their 3′-5′ organisation mirrors their expression pattern along the A-P axis. This correspondence between body axis and genomic organisation is termed co-linearity. The Hox gene cluster is actually divided into two partial clusters in Drosophila; the Antennapedia complex (ANT-C) and the Bithorax complex (BX-C). Figure showing the expression of ABD-A (red), and ABD-B (green) in the embryonic CNS. Abd-A is expressed in the embryonic epidermis and CNS in parasegments (PS) 7-12 but is excluded from PS13. Like this: Like Loading... ScienceIndex_ : From...
ScienceIndex_ : Drawb... ScienceIndex_ : Label... ScienceIndex_ : Phylo... ScienceIndex_ : The E... ScienceIndex_ : Down-... ScienceIndex_ : Inhib... Sciencedaily : RNA: From messenger to gua... ResearchBlogging.org: Patterns of RNA methylatio... Patterns of RNA methylation. A new paper in Cell provides a transcriptome-wide survey of the methylation of adenosine residues in RNAs. Meyer et al find that this epitranscriptomic post-transcriptional modification is widespread and dynamically regulated, and likely to play important roles in cellular regulation. Methylation of the N6 position of adenosine residues (m6A) has been known to be a post-transcriptional modification of RNAs for many years. Research in the 1960’s and 70’s demonstrated that m6A is present in tRNAs, rRNAs and viral RNAs, and made up between 0.1% and 0.4% or total adenosines in cellular RNA.
However as m6A was not easily detectable by commonly available methods, research on this modified base foundered. A recent spur to experimentation on m6A has come from the analysis of a gene linked to obesity. As m6A is not detectable by sequencing or hybridisation based techniques, nor susceptible to chemical modification, Meyer et al. based their experiments on the use of an anti-m6A antibody (ά-m6A). Science Index: RNA i... Science Index: Devel... E! Science News: CSHL study uncovers a new... PhysOrg Science News: Research uncovers new exce... E! Science News: Researchers reveal an RNA... Jenie J: Researchers have identifie...
PhysOrg Science News: Researchers reveal an RNA... Science Index: RNA S... Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Science Index: Revea... ScienceIndex_: Meios... Twitter. ScienceIndex_: The R... Science Index: Chara... ScienceIndex_: Compa... Science Index: Malac... ResearchBlogging.org: Fixing mitochindrial mutat... Science Index: RNA-b... RNA-based vaccines. Science Index: The T... View All. ScienceIndex_: Singl... PhysOrg Science News: Locked down, RNA editing y... Locked down, RNA editing yields odd fly behavior. Because a function of RNA is to be translated as the genetic instructions for the protein-making machinery of cells, RNA editing is the body's way of fine-tuning the proteins it produces, allowing us to adapt. The enzyme ADAR, which does this editing job in the nervous system of creatures ranging from mice to men, even edits itself. In a new study that examined the self-editing process and locked it down at two extremes in fruit flies, Brown University scientists found some surprising insights into how this "fine-tuning of the fine-tuner" happens, including bizarre behavioral effects that come about when the self-editor can't edit.
Take mating, for instance. When the researchers fixed self-editing in dADAR (as drosophila fruit fly ADAR is known) at a very high level in males, they created fruit fly wallflowers. By contrast, when they fixed self-editing at a low level, they created shameless pick-up artists. The inner workings "Auto-editing changes with temperature," Reenan said. Science Index: Trans... Nature.com blogs: Synthetic Nucleic Acids: B... Synthetic Nucleic Acids: Beyond DNA and RNA | Bio 2.0 | Learn Science at Scitable. Synthetic biology is such a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary field that it seems like every new paper sends me into a new area of science that I hadn't considered before. The latest issue of Science features a paper1 on synthetic nucleic acids, completely new molecules capable of information storage just like DNA and RNA, dubbed xeno-nucleic acids, or XNAs. There are lots of reasons to understand the limits of biological-or chemical-information storage. It is truly wondrous that the phenomenon exists at all; our genome is quite an awe-inspiring 46-molecule collection (for each chromosome is, at heart, an enormously long but unbroken molecule of DNA).
All life, at least as we know it, uses DNA or RNA for storing and retrieving genetic information. However, there is no way to know directly what the first molecule of life was. What the researchers did was build nucleic acids with the same four bases-A, C, T, and G-but with different sugars. A Tangent References: Science Index: A pot... Science Index: Sensi... Zhiguang eric zhang: RT @rnomics: #RNA story: C... Zhiguang eric zhang: Click chemistry avoids use... Labnews.co. A new technique to click together DNA and RNA segments has won researchers from Southampton and Oxford a £4 million grant from the BBSRC. Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Southampton will use the grant – a strategic Longer and Larger (sLoLa) grant – to develop the technique, which could make biotechnology research cheaper and more efficient. The researchers have found that clicking RNA and DNA together using chemical methods could replace the use of enzymes and could enable the production of useful DNA and RNA structures more efficiently and on a large scale the is currently possible.
“Synthesising long DNA molecules by chemical methods is slow and requires a great deal of skill. To avoid this, biologists usually ask chemists to make a large number of very short DNA strands which they glue together using enzymes,” said Professor Tom Brown from Southampton. “These enzymes, which have evolved to work under very specific conditions, work brilliantly if you treat them kindly. Science Index: Famil... Sciencedaily: Strange cousins: Molecular... PhysOrg Science News: Molecular alternatives to... Science Index: Compe... Science Index: Large... Science Index: Utili... Science Index: RNAi... ScienceIndex_: Accur... ScienceIndex_: RNAim... Science Index: The u... PhysOrg Science News: 3-D RNA modeling opens sci... 3-D RNA modeling opens scientific doors. In a paper published today in the journal Nature Methods, a team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill demonstrates a simple, cost-effective technique for three-dimensional RNA structure prediction that will help scientists understand the structures, and ultimately the functions, of the RNA molecules that dictate almost every aspect of human cell behavior.
When cell behavior goes wrong, diseases – including cancer and metabolic disorders – can be the result. Over the past five decades, scientists have described more than 80,000 protein structures, most of which are now publicly available and provide important information to medical researchers searching for targets for drug therapy. However, a similar effort to catalogue RNA structures has mapped only a few hundred RNA molecules. As a result, the potential of RNA molecules has just barely been developed as targets for new therapeutics. "With Dr. Explore further: Synthetic gene circuits pump up cell signals. Science Index: Struc... Science Index: An in... Science Index: The O...