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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
Spread by AIDs and supported by life! It's like FAT, spread by Windowsand supported by Linux!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
With the FORBES greatest breakthroughs of the last century and this, it seems like innovation and discovery is happening much more in the area of biology than anywhere else. I mean, the most notable discoveries according to FORBES in the last 20 years were mostly drugs.
It came from the same place(berkly) as BSD!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
you're just so used to seeing those huge 9-inch RNA molecules you don't realize that the average human RNA molecule is roughly 5 inches long. (for caucasians.. african american RNA is closer to a 6-inch average) this length is, in fact, the most comfortable length for carrying the human genetic code. my RNA is roughly 3.5 inches long, and I'm quite proud of it. so's my wife.
Isn't "small" RNA properly called "transport" RNA? Or are these not the same thing? If they're both the same thing, then the discovery was about a couple of years ago, IIRC.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
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
Now that's science I like!
Read the article will ya:
They don't say they discovered RNA, they say they found out that RNA does something we didn't know it did.
You can't take the sky from me...
It is talking about tinyRNA, not the normal DNA wannabies!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Beyond being racist and elistist, and pro industrialist, it's just false too: AIDS doesn't kill fast enough that populations are being decimated or even kept under control.
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?
Researchers at Oregon State University have made an important advance in the understanding of "micro-RNA" molecules, which are tiny bits of genetic material that were literally unknown 10 years ago but now represent one of the most exciting new fields of study in biology.
The findings will be reported Friday in the journal Science.
They reveal for the first time a new mechanism by which micro-RNA can stop the function of messenger-RNA by literally cutting it in half, interfering with the normal function of specific messenger RNAs in gene expression.
This "expression" of genes that code for essential proteins is ultimately what controls whether a cell turns into a lung, liver, brain or other cell. Understanding what activates this process - or stops it - is a key to understanding the biological process of life itself, and forms the foundation for advances in medicine, agriculture and other fields.
On this frontier of biology, experts say, the most intriguing new component is micro-RNA, a minuscule type of regulatory molecule that had seemed insignificant even in the extraordinarily tiny, microscopic world of cell biology.
The first micro-RNA, in fact, was only discovered in 1993 and at the time was thought to be a biological oddity in worms. A couple hundred have since been discovered in both plants and animals. But it has only been in just the past few months that scientists working in this area have come to understand the potentially profound importance of micro-RNA.
"For a long time, people really did not know that these micro-RNAs were even there," said James Carrington, a professor and director of the OSU Center for Gene Research and Biotechnology. "They were under the radar, and observations of them were limited by our technology. But as we learn more about these regulatory molecules, we're beginning to understand the scope of their biological importance. In molecular biology, micro-RNAs are clearly one of the top two or three discoveries of the past decade."
Every normal cell in complex organisms, such as plants, flies and humans, has a complete copy of the DNA for the entire organism, some 15,000 to 35,000 genes that collectively are thought of as the genetic blueprint for life. But to serve as certain types of cells, such as brain in humans or roots in plants, only a much smaller number of genes within each cell are actually "expressed," or allowed to create the proteins that perform these separate life functions.
"A key focus in biology for a long time has been what controls gene expression," Carrington said.
It is well understood, Carrington said, that two of the key steps between DNA and a functional cell are the processes of transcription and translation. In transcription, single-stranded "messenger RNA" molecules that correspond to each expressed gene are produced. And in translation, the messenger RNA is decoded, resulting in the production of a protein made from some combination of 20 amino acids.
"This is a very complex series of biological processes that requires hundreds of proteins and other factors," Carrington said. "And we're now also learning the role of micro-RNA in controlling expression of some important genes."
Micro-RNAs are actually produced by the transcription of tiny genes, in regions of the genome that were previously thought to be vacant or useless DNA. However, unlike messenger RNAs, micro-RNAs are not translated to produce proteins. Instead, researchers are finding that these micro-RNAs have critical functions in controlling the process of gene expression.
In some recent studies, other scientists found that micro-RNAs can bind to specific messenger RNAs to block the translation or decoding process. In the latest advance made by the OSU researchers, micro-RNAs in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana were found to destroy messenger RNAs instead of blocking its function, by literally cutting it in half.
"Much of our understanding of cell biology is related to this area we call negative regulation, or the processes that stops genes from being expressed," Carrington said. "Anything that improves our knowledge of this process could be quite significant."
For one thing, Carrington said, micro-RNAs might be intimately involved in the normal function of stem cells, those biologically unique cells that, when reproducing, can produce either more stem cells or begin a line of cells that is differentiated into something else, a brain, lung or liver cell.
"It's very important that we learn how cells differentiate and grow normally," Carrington said. "Just about everything in the human body has a genetic component. Genetic abnormalities relate to birth and developmental defects, susceptibility to disease, misregulation of genes. And these same processes are also at work in all other life forms, including plants, and new findings could be applied to crop biotechnology or even traditional plant breeding."
Continued research, Carrington said, will almost undoubtedly find human genetic defects that can be traced to dysfunction of micro-RNAs.
This broad area of research, officials say, has such promise that major new studies are being developed across the nation.
OSU was recently the recipient of a four-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study micro-RNAs in Arabidopsis, a plant that works well as a model for genetic research, and the researchers will try to identify the functional messenger RNA targets of different micro-RNAs.
Scientists expect that some of the life processes controlled by micro-RNAs in plants will have been conserved across millions of years of evolution and operate the same way in animals, including humans.
Until recently, RNA was thought to do little more than carry out DNA's instructions for building proteins.
However, the new picture, which Science says came into focus this year, shows small RNAs at the heart of many of the cell's genetic workings.
This is an oversimplification, probably intended for a lay audience. For the past 20 years or so, RNA has been known to have enzymatic functions. At first this catalytic property of RNA had been thought to be limited to primitive organisms. However, recent research has shown that rRNA, which is the RNA component of ribosomes, is in fact the catalytic component of the peptidyltransferase reaction that creates polypeptides, which in turn make up proteins. Moreover, although there is no direct proof yet, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that indicates mRNA splicing in eukaryotes is also catalyzed by RNA (in the form of "small nuclear RNAs" or snRNAs). To state that RNAs are only part of the information chain from DNAs to proteins is a misjustice to the complexity of RNA biology.
The small RNAs that are described in this article are not even catalytic; in fact, to your average RNA biochemist these small RNAs are not all that interesting. They are, however, very interesting to people who study gene regulation, because that appears to be the normal role of these small RNAs. Biotech companies are also interested because they are a way to target specific genes for inactivation.
NO CARRIER
It has recently been shown that the 'junk' DNA, the stuff in between the protein producing genes, actually regulates protein production. These small RNA molecules created from the transcription of this junk DNA can interfere with the transcription of downstream genes. This interference prevents the production of proteins, and if used correctly could treat disease by limiting the production of inappropriate proteins.
This is an important discovery because most scientists ignored the existence of this 'junk', without acknowleging that everything in a cell has a purpose. Researchers have known that these non-protein producing DNA segments have existed for many years, only recently did someone ask why they existed. That is why this is an important discovery.
Karma: Censored (mostly affected by decency laws)
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that most of that software run on clusters of Linux machines.
tRNA and small RNA (snRNA?) are members of the evil plot by scientists bent on intimidating those of us dinosaurs who went to a lot of trouble a dozen years ago to learn all the stuff that was then hot science. And it works!
The progress is staggering, and appears exponential. When HIV was idscovered, they said that a dozen or so years earlier the technology to identify the virus didn't even exist. HIV gets the unwitting assistance of host tRNA and other cellular machinery.
Of the RNA family, let's not forget about mRNA. Any other alpha-RNA's I should know about? Here is a quiz if you'd like to show off your acronymial brilliancce!
That picture makes me want to use the image from the Cosmic Background Imager as my background. Hey, if I run Linux on my microwave, I could have a Cosmic Microwave Background microwave background.
Well, its not quite a film of electrons, but we're apparently getting close. This quote is from Science... "This year, researchers turned their new attosecond strobes onto the action within atoms. In October, the Austrian and German members of the original team used their attosecond pulses to excite electrons in krypton atoms, each of which left behind an electron vacancy. With another laser pulse, they were then able to track the timing with which excited electrons gave up some of their energy and fell back into the more stable energy levels. It's not Hitchcock, but attosecond movies will give physicists a whole new view of life inside the atom."
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'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds...
Parent poster is correct, if rude. What grandparent poster said would have been true a few years ago. Things have changed since then, obviously.
Whenever one hears of a scientific discovery that runs counter to preconceived notions, it's a good idea to RTFA before saying "that's impossible." Science's notion of what is and isn't possible changes all the time; that is one of its two greatest strengths (the other being that it demands rigorous proof before changing) and pretty much what distinguishes it from those areas of human thought, such as religion, which rely solely on received wisdom.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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-
However, it would be wrong to assume that *everything* in the body is there because it serves some purpose. There are clear cases in biology of remnant structures which don't serve any purpose in the animal's (or plant, for that matter) current environment.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Ah, vocabulary provocation.
To kill 1 in 10 is only one of the possible meanings of decimate. Dictionary.com
For example, decimate can be used to describe the 'decimation' of the Jews in Europe in WWII, despite the percentage genocide being over 90%. And the Romans aren't the only ones who needed the 'special' word, variants of decimate and decimation appear in other languages.
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.