Month: September 2022

JEWELS OF DARWIN. When hunting in the bowels of research, make sure that you are organized into clear and defined sections, but also permit a stream of connected consciousness to be your guide; boxes can be misleading. Then collect the truly beautiful, the weird and the downright gnarly just as you would a collection of rare stamps with esoteric misprints. No single living thing is too small or insignificant to not deserve rapt attention. More often than not, the one informs the other. View in LinkedIn

FIND THE WHY behind the diverse collections in themes, so that the organizing principles at the highest level start to emerge from the quacking populous of quirky diversity. Ever strive to join the dots between deep silos of specialized, often brilliant, and obscure scholarship. Concepts are hard won, wrested from the warm wet substratum of life itself. View in LinkedIn

RNA PROCESSING SEGREGATION. "Not only would this segregation prevent translating ribosomes from interfering with the splicing reaction (and vice versa) but would also prevent the translation of incompletely processed mRNAs, which often encode toxic proteins." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

QUALITY EDITING. "Importantly, the segregation of translation from both transcription and RNA processing provided an opportunity for nuclear quality-control processes to eliminate misprocessed and spurious transcripts that did not meet the minimal requirements of “mRNA identity” before these RNAs ever encountered a ribosome." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

PROLIFERATION OF START SITES. "The segregation of translation from both transcription and RNA processing...in turn permitted intergenic DNA and cryptic transcriptional start sites to proliferate with minimal cost to the fitness of the organism." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

PAYING FOR WASTEFUL TRANSCRIPTION. "It should also be noted that the increase in ATP regeneration due to mitochondrial-derived metabolic pathways provided the surplus energy that is required to support an expansion not only in genome size and membranes, but also wasteful transcription." https://lnkd.in/eT5V5Xc View in LinkedIn

ANCIENT ENDOSYMBIOSIS EVENT. "Thus, by several independent mechanisms, the acquisition of mitochondria likely allowed the expansion of nonfunctional intergenic DNA and the evolution of a noisy transcriptional system." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL CONSEQUENCE. "Eukaryotic transcription is inherently noisy." When a completely foreign metabolic pathway is bolted-on, no surprise. http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

MOSTLY TRANSCRIBED. "One of the most widely discussed discoveries of the past decade of transcriptome analysis is that much of the metazoan genome is transcribed at some level." Even non-coding ("junk" viral DNA). http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

INCOMPLETE CATALOG. "The application of deep sequencing to RNA analysis has shown that the majority of the genomic sequence is transcribed in humans and other metazoan species. These analyses have resulted in the identification of thousands of novel coding and non-coding genes. Yet, it is clear that the full catalog of transcription remains elusive." https://lnkd.in/e9BHyYj View in LinkedIn