– If you are interested in molecular biology, there’s a great article in the January 2007 issue of Scientific American entitled, “the Power of Riboswitches”. My degree, from many years ago, is in Microbiology so I find this stuff extremely interesting.
– Decoding how our genomes work is like decoding software that arrived on an alien spacecraft. It is believed that before Earth’s biology became DNA centric, there was an earlier time when it was RNA centric. Here, scientists are describing some of this older RNA functionality that still exists within bacterial cells and, in one case, multicellular genomes.
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Discovering relics from a lost world run by RNA molecules may lead to modern tools for fighting disease
By Jeffrey E. Barrick and Ronald R. Breaker
A mystery surrounding the way bacteria manage their vitamins piqued our interest in the fall of 2000. Together with growing evidence in support of a tantalizing theory about the earliest life on earth and our own efforts to build switches from biological molecules, the bacterial conundrum set our laboratory group at Yale University in search of an answer. What we found was a far bigger revelation than we were expecting: it was a new form of cellular self-control based on one of the oldest types of molecule around–ribonucleic acid, or RNA.
Long viewed as mostly a lowly messenger, RNA could have considerable authority, as it turned out, and sophisticated mechanisms for asserting it. Although the workings of this newfound class of RNA molecules that we dubbed riboswitches are still being characterized, it is already clear that they may also provide novel ways of fighting human diseases. Many pathogenic bacteria rely on riboswitches to control aspects of their own fundamental metabolism, for instance.
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