I recently received a message from someone who had a fascinating video on transcription, which he wanted to share with people he knew. The video, titled “The Central Dogma,” was produced by the RIKEN Omics Science Center for the exhibition titled ‘Beyond DNA’ held at National Science Museum of Japan, and can also be viewed here. Readers are invited to form their own conclusions. Any further comment on my part would be superfluous: the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words was never truer than for the video you are about to watch. Here’s the Youtube video:

Work by a husband-and-wife team of virologists is shedding new light on an old scientific dispute: did viruses emerge before or after the development of cellular life? Until recently, many scientists believed that viruses only appeared after the first cells emerged on the primordial Earth. However, the recent discovery of strange genes in giant viruses is leading some scientists to suggest that the ancestors of viruses evolved before cells. Are they alive or aren’t they? Giant viruses, which were first described in 2003, straddle the gap between viruses and bacteria. Despite the fact that viruses undergo natural selection and reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly – an ability which University of Cape Town virologist Ed Rybicki considers Read More ›

A good number of proteomic researchers believe there are millions of protein isoforms. A protein isoform is a slight variation of a basic protein. I’m not averse to thinking there are only a limited number of “genes” that govern a basic number of limited protein classes, but that there are millions or billions of protein isoforms. Consider something like the DSCAM gene which has 38,016 alternative splices and presumably 38,016 isoforms. And how about the Dystrophin gene that consist of 2.5 million base pairs and codes for a protein with 3,500 amino acids? There are only a few isoforms so far identified, but with a gene that gigantic, one might guess there is much to discover about the Dystrophin gene. Read More ›