Genomics
Central Dogma: Reasons for Further Thought
For about a year now, from reading various news items on newly published science articles, I’ve begun to consider not DNA, but RNA, the real driver of life. I think that DNA’s essential role is that of information storage–a hard drive, while RNA is like the BIOS system–it tells the “system” what it should be doing. I’ve been waiting for the right article to come along to present this newer view of genomic life. Well, it appears that the ‘right article’ has come along. This is from Phys.Org and this is the pdf online version of the article. From the Press Release via Phys.Org: Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed Read More ›
Cells compared across species — expected to be similar — prove strikingly different
Nature’s diversions: Creeping vole has weird sex chromosomes
Weirder: Dinoflagellate genes all point the same way
Dinoflagellate genome structure is unique
Giraffe genome points to maybe four species but it is “not evolutionary”
Dawkins’s thesis that the bacterial flagellum evolved from the injectisome is no longer tenable, prof says
What? Some viruses use an “alternative” genetic alphabet?
Project to map 70,000 vertebrate genomes already turning up more bad news for “junk DNA”
Researchers search for the “last bacterial common ancestor” in a world of horizontal gene transfer
Archaea microbes have genes like flexible slinkies
They were only discovered in 1977 and they get more unusual all the time: Microbes called archaea package their genetic material into flexible shapes that flop open in unusual ways, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Karolin Luger reports March 2, 2021, in the journal eLife. “Very much to our surprise, we found that these structures can undergo all sorts of gymnastics,” says Luger, a biochemist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Like DNA in the nucleus of human cells, archaeal DNA coils around proteins like string wrapped around a yo-yo. But there’s another twist, the team found. Those coils of DNA can also spread 90 degrees apart—a phenomenon scientists hadn’t seen before. Such bends in the springlike structures could Read More ›