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Science Magazine's Highlight Of 2002
gingerTabs writes "BBC News is reporting that the 2002 Science Magazine highlight of 2002 is the discovery of the small RNA molecule. Whould've thunk it, eh?"
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HIV has RNA to carry its message and mutates a lot. Perhaps with this new information about RNA we will be that much closer to a way to stop HIV.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
It ought to be noted that the SNO guys that did all the hardwork to find out what was going on with the neutrinos used PDSF, a large linux cluster used in a batch farm configuration. The Japanese observatory that verified the work also used PDSF, as I understand.
The PDSF guys got a lot of thank yous and praise for the help they gave in building, running, and growing their cluster. PDSF as a result has been getting a lot of kudos from the NERSC management. With any luck that will translate into better backing.
At any rate, I thought I'd include them since /. readers like to hear how Linux is used IRL science.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
A valid cause indeed, just think about it, all the things people are "born with" that they can't control could simply be replaced by a stem cell with a new set of DNA and you don't have to "live" with it anymore. Kidneys not working right (diabetes etc.) grow some new ones, the possibilities of stem cell research are virtually at this time endless. Genetics can be used to heal people, it doesn't have to be used to "clone" people or "play God", if anything stem cell research is there to clean up what God screwed up (if you want to view it that way).
I would say that while the RNA molecules themselves aren't a huge breakthrough the discoveries that come next certainly are. In my previous posts I've mentioned research the government has pissed money away on, this is one that I do believe fully in and support wholeheartedly. A world free from disease will indeed be a better world, think about the boost it would have on the basic level of living, no AIDS, no Cancer, no ANYTHING bad ...
This is in itself actually an amazing step forward in helping us all out as a society and moreso as a species.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I work for a company that sells products based on a particular type of small RNA, called siRNA (small interfering RNA).
These are just ~20 bp double stranded RNA fragments that will bind to a full length messenger RNA (mRNA) and cause the mRNA to be chopped up by a protein called dicer.
These siRNA can be artifically introduced into cultured cells (human, mouse, etc) using plasmids to express the siRNA or just using RNA itself. Then you get to see what happens to the cells when a gene is nearly shut off.
It's a very quick way to create knockouts of genes, and much will be learned from these techniques.
I love these kinds of posts...
Uhh... Yeah, we've known about computers for a while too... so is linux kernel 2.5 is old news?
How bout ASCII files. They've been around forever. Has XML been around forever?
Uh, Computer Science, like Engineering, is not a *real* science. You are actually the poor cousin; you get no real funding, no real recognition, and no real respect regardless of the feat.
These guys sell drugs at maximum profit; with very few exceptions, we sell ours for Free or on a bargain table at CompUSA. They often can only prove mostly insignificant efficacy; ours works most of the time.
I do not feel this way, but I know more than a few (in positions of control) who do.
To decimate means to kill every tenth person.
In South Africa, roughly 25% of the population
has HIV. Barring a (cheap) cure, that's likely
to result in substantially more than decimation.
You've got to love those Romans. They're the
only people in history who actually needed a
special word to refer to the process of killing
every tenth person.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I think the source of your confusion on this is the way Science chose to title the story. By "Small RNAs" they didn't actually mean snoRNA-sized things (for instance, go here and click on "Overview of snoRNAs"). They're talking about what have been referred to as "tiny RNAs" or most commonly "small interfering RNAs" (siRNAs) in the literature (for instance see here about siRNAs, and there's also a very good discussion of them here as well as a couple of other classes of really small RNA molecules. The sizes of all these things tend to intergrade a bit, so there's a little terminological confusion sometimes. The primary differences tend to be by definition of function.
Here's a quote from the Science article which illustrates their point:
Another crucial step came last year, when Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and his colleagues identified an enzyme, appropriately dubbed Dicer, that generates the small RNA molecules by chopping double-stranded RNA into little pieces. These bits belong to one of two small RNA classes produced by different types of genes: microRNAs (miRNAs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs). SiRNAs are considered to be the main players in RNAi, although miRNAs, which inhibit translation of RNA into protein, were recently implicated in this machinery as well.
The exciting part in all of this is that function is now being assigned to what people previously tended to refer to as "all that gunk at the bottom of the gel".
Only a fraction of the DNA encodes proteins. That other stuff is "junk DNA", we have a complete map of the relevant stuff.
Oh, that small RNA? It's just building blocks for - or fragments of - the real stuff.
Even well educated people are too quick to dismiss something they don't understand. This has recently be most evident in cell biology. The mouse can sense the elephants foot, let's just hope he doesn't get himself stepped on.
Paul
You don't know what you don't know.