Today’s Popular Posts
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Tag Archives: RNA
DNA nanosensors
Not all sensors are electronic, or at least if you expand the scope of sensor technology, measurement techniques (which is what sensor technology is about) can also be chemical or physical, among other things. In this case, the sensor is built from DNA and it’s called a DNA nanosensor. The idea behind this particular nanosensor [...]
Posted in News: Sensor Technology Also tagged assay, cell programming, DNA, nanosensor, protein, sensor technology, signaling pathway, transcription factor 1 Comment
lincRNA: A recently discovered RNA organizes stem cell differentiation
What makes a scientist’s heart go pitter-patter? Something like this: When the Broad team discovered more than 3,500 unique lincRNAs in the human and mouse genomes in 2009, “the potential was enormous, and we wanted to know what they could be doing.” [Source: Technology Review] Here’s the scenario: A team of researchers at the Broad [...]
Posted in News: Proteomics Also tagged Broad Institute, cell development, DNA, genetics, Guttmann, lincRNA, pluripotent, proteomics, stem cells 1 Comment
Epigenetics and methylation: New DNA bases linked to protein
Adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine: These are the nucleobases, or just plain bases of DNA that in pairs called nucleotides carry the genetic code of life. There are four of them, right? At least that’s what most everybody learns. Of course, there is another base, uracil, which is found in RNA where it replaces thymine. [...]
Posted in News: Epigenetics Also tagged cytosine, DNA, epigenetics, methylation, new bases, nucleotide, Tet, Zhang Leave a comment
Toward a new DNA: thymine out, chlorouracil in
Scientists have been twiddling with DNA for some time. While DNA may be the blueprint of life, it is not immutable (of course) and that means the hand of man likes to poke around in the mix. One kind of poking has been to see if one of the bases – adenine (A), thymine (T), [...]
Posted in News: Synthetic Biology Also tagged chemical evolution, chlorouracil, DNA, nucleic acids, synthetic biology, thymine, uracil, xenobiology 1 Comment
Toward a universal flu virus vaccine
If the vaccine developed by a team at Oxford University (UK) passes successfully through all the phases of human testing, this will really be big news. As it is, it is an enormously hopeful development toward the control of human influenza (the flu) and the threat of pandemics. Fighting flu viruses is like going after [...]
Posted in News: Pandemics Also tagged cytotoxic, flu, influenza, M protein 1, matrix protein, MVA, NP, nucleocapsid, Sarah Gilbert, T-cells, vaccine, virus Leave a comment
Hoogsteen base pairs: An alternate structure in DNA
Reverse Hoogsteen base pairing…..Wikipedia Commons I know some of my biases. One of them is knee-jerk skepticism about taking little-tested scientific results and blowing them up to “…a cure for cancer” or “…revolutionize the electronics industry.” However, like most people I also have a bias to be curious about interesting, if somewhat unusual scientific findings. [...]
Posted in Impact: DNA Decoding Also tagged base pairs, biochemistry, DNA, double-helix, epigenetics, genetic coding, genetics, histones, Hoogsteen, NMR, proteins 3 Comments
An odd couple: Arsenic and Life
It was unlikely that GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria would grip the imagination; but it did. Of course, it did because instead of the long scientific name or the cryptic GFAJ-1, it was simply called Alien Life! This, of course, caused a minor sensation. It was even covered by the non-science media. The [...]
Posted in Impact: Origin of Life Also tagged alien life, arsenic, arsenic based life, biochemistry, DNA, GFAJ-1, origin of life, phosphorus, Wolfe-Simon Leave a comment
The shape of the genome influences genetics
Fission yeast genome……Credit: Wistar Institute It looks like a loose ball of yarn, as in the picture above. In fact, it’s the genome of a common yeast (S. pombe). The human genome spends most of its time in a ball something like this. The familiar “X” shaped chromosomes occur only at the time of cell [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Also tagged 3C, chromosome conformation capture, chromosomes, DNA, gene, genetics, genome, genome shape, sequencing Leave a comment
New finding: Noncoding RNA is the agent of gene silencing
This is news about research by Ingrid Grummt and colleagues at the German Cancer Research Center (Heidelberg, Germany) and their progress in discovering how instructions coded in DNA are correctly sequenced (silenced or activated). But first, an analogy: Way way back in the cave-person era of computing (say 1954), a ‘programmer’ would stand at a [...]
Posted in News: Cell Biology Also tagged DNA, epigenetics, gene, gene regulation, methylation, methyltransferase, mRNA, ncRNA, non-coding RNA, pRNA Leave a comment
Stem Cells: Using RNA to reprogram adult cells
To get around the problems of developing stem cells from embryonic material (problems mostly associated with ethical and religious considerations), biologists are researching a number of ways to produce stem cells from adult cells. Keep in mind that adult cells, for example skin or muscle cells, have already ‘set’ their form and function. Returning them [...]
Posted in News: Stem Cells Also tagged adult cell, DNA, embryonic, iPSC, modified RNA, pluripotent, protein expression, reprogramming, stem cell Leave a comment
New study: It’s possible life originated in ice
Life (on Earth) had to start somewhere, why not in ice? Why not indeed, except that for many decades it’s been assumed that life started in a – warm – primordial soup of some kind. Perhaps not a ‘soup,’ but somewhere warm or nearly hot (not boiling, of course) such as near an undersea volcanic [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged DNA, ice pockets, molecular chemistry, organic chemistry, origin of life, ribozyme, solar system life 1 Comment
A form of muscular dystrophy depends on ‘junk’ DNA
Back in February of this year (2010) a study in Nature reported on finding a segment of human DNA, one of the areas in the so-called ‘junk genes,’ that contributed to a form of coronary artery disease. [SciTechStory: Junk DNA that actually does something] Now there is another study, in the magazine Science [A Unifying [...]
Posted in Impact: DNA Decoding Also tagged chromosome 4, FSHD, gene, genetics, genome, junk DNA, muscular dystrophy, transcription Leave a comment
microRNA: A cellular communicator
Discovered only about fifteen years ago, research on the non-coding variant of RNA called microRNA (or miRNA) continues to expand its role. New work by Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues at five Chinese institutions has identified miRNA as an important cell-to-cell and cell-to-organ communication mechanism, one that is more versatile than the traditional notion of cellular [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Also tagged atherosclerosis, cell communication, DNA, epigenetics, microRNA, miR-150, miRNA Leave a comment
New for epigenetics: Active pseudogenes and RNA as gene regulator
How is it that the human genome, with about 23,000 protein coding genes, can produce such a complicated organism as the human being, when the laboratory flatworm (C. elegans, a relatively simple organism) has about 20,000 coding genes? It seems fairly obvious that there must be something else at work in more complex organisms that [...]
Posted in Impact: Cell Biology Also tagged cancer, cell biology, ceRNA, DNA, epigenetics, genome, microRNA, molecular biology, mRNA, proteins, pseudogene, PTEN, PTENP1 Leave a comment
The Human Genome Project: Ten years later
Ten year retrospectives are a popular form of gazing at near history. So it is with looking at the results of the first complete sequencing of the human genome (first draft released June 26, 2000). The Human Genome Project was a three billion dollar multi-year program that finally achieved the long sought genome-wide catalog of [...]
Posted in Impact: DNA Decoding Also tagged DNA, genetics, genome, GWAS, Human Genome Project, major disease cures, medicine, SNP Leave a comment
Extending life with diet or insulin has trade-offs
Over the last decade or so, two of the most promising avenues of research in gerontology (the study of aging) and the search for means of extending human life have been on the effects of restricting diet and the activity of the hormone insulin. Numerous studies have shown that caloric restriction (not starvation, but a [...]
Posted in News: Extending Lifespan Also tagged aging, C. elegans, CREB, diet restriction, DNA, flatworm, insulin, lifespan, memory, memory loss, mRNA, protein, sRNA Leave a comment
Reversing silenced genes improves quality of induced stem cells
As has been the case for more than a decade, the promise of stem cells to create breakthroughs in cell biology and medicine has been hampered by the difficulty in obtaining sufficient quantities of high quality pluripotent stem cells (cells capable of changing into almost any other kind of cell). Human embryonic stem cells are [...]
Posted in News: Stem Cells Also tagged DNA, embryonic stem cells, gene, genetic, iPSC, molecular genetics, pluripotent, stem cells, transcription Leave a comment
Small steps toward understanding the epigenome
“You can think of it this way,” said Ren. “Neurons and skin cells share the identical set of genetic material – DNA – yet their structure and function are very different. The difference can be attributed to differences in their epigenome. This is analogous to computer hardware and software. You can load the same computer [...]
Posted in Impact: Cell Biology Also tagged adult cells, cell biology, chromatin, DNA, epigenetics, epigenome, fibroblasts, genetics, histones, mitochondria, nESC, nucleus, organic chemistry, stem cells 1 Comment
Epigenetics and introns: Life beyond DNA
The discovery and gradual elucidation of DNA and the genetic code over the last half century was certainly one of the most important achievements in science during that time – or arguably, any time. DNA and genetics also, rightfully, have dominated much of the thinking and interest in the biological sciences. So, without taking away [...]
A new layer of genetic information: DNA sub-code
To some it sounds like something out of a spy story – sub-codes within the genetic code. Ah the hidden code; Dan Brown would be proud of the discovery. The actual discovery is perhaps not so thrilling, but potentially much more important than novelistic entertainment. Two researchers, Professor Yves Barral (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), and Dr. [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Also tagged cell biology, DNA, gene expression, genetics, molecular biology, regulation, sub-code, transcription, tRNA Leave a comment
Cell development: microRNA moves between cells
How do cells develop; how do tissues form? For example, what guides cells to form a heart? These are crucial questions for molecular biology and an area with decades of research that still feels like it’s just getting started. Case in point: Researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI, New York, USA) [...]
Posted in News: Cell Biology Also tagged cell development, differentiation, microRNA, molecular biology, pathway, signal Leave a comment
Enhancer RNA (eRNA): More powerful than previously thought
As should be said repeatedly, we don’t know how the brain works. Not yet. Neuroscience is just starting on the vastly complex study of the brain at the molecular level, perhaps the lowest common denominator and the most important. A new study, published April 15 in Nature, by a team of researchers from Harvard Medical [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged ChIP-seq, DNA, epigenetics, eRNA, junk DNA, neurons, neuroscience, RNA-seq Leave a comment
Found: Another molecule needed at the origin of life
Very often important science is constructed by a myriad of small advances in knowledge. This is almost certainly going to be true for answering one of the big questions in biology: “How did life on Earth originate?” It’s been known for a long time that it probably originated where there was a concentrated mixture of [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged biochemistry, DNA, ethidium, intercalator, oligonucleotides, organic compound, origin of life, paleochemistry, polymer Leave a comment
Can culture change the genome?
Almost from the beginning of our knowledge of genetics, it’s been asked, “Can the way we (humans) live change our genetics?” These days this is much the same as asking if culture can change the genome. It’s actually a relatively old question. The question got its biggest boost from one who is now a boogeyman [...]
Posted in Impact: Genetic Modification Also tagged biology, culture, DNA, EDAR, epigenetics, evolution, genes, genetic modification, genetics, genome, Lamarck, molecular biology 1 Comment
microDNA: A new piece of genetics puzzle