RNA is a fundamental ingredient in all known forms of life—so when RNA goes awry, a lot can go wrong. RNA misregulation plays a critical role in the development of many disorders, such as mental disability, autism and cancer.
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 20, 2015
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In any textbook diagram, a group of red blood cells, skin cells or nerve cells will typically be identical in size. But, just as no two people are quite the same height and weight, in a population of real cells there are ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 11, 2015
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29
Once upon a time, scientists thought RNA polymerase—the molecule that kicks off protein synthesis by transcribing DNA into RNA—worked like a wind-up toy: Set it down at a start site in our DNA and it would whir steadily ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 24, 2015
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The differences between different tissues, such as brain and muscle, and between healthy and unhealthy human cells are largely defined by changes in the abundance of proteins in the cells. Transcription—the process that ...
Biotechnology
Mar 20, 2015
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920
One of the surprising discoveries to emerge from the young field of comparative genomics is that drastically different organisms—humans, sea urchins, worms, flies —are endowed with a more or less common set of genes. ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 20, 2015
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The central dogma of molecular biology describes the flow of genetic information. It was first described by Francis Crick in 1956 as one-way traffic: as: "DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein."
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 11, 2015
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(Phys.org)—The majority of the human genome is located within the nucleus. However, there is a small but important portion of DNA located within the mitochondria. This mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has received much attention ...
Before DNA can be transcribed into RNA, an early step in turning the genetic template into protein, the nucleus must first assemble a molecular machine called the pre-initiation complex (PIC), capable of unzipping the double ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 2, 2014
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Case Western Reserve School of Medicine scientists have made an extraordinary double discovery. First, they have identified thousands of novel long non-coding ribonucleic acid (lncRNA) transcripts. Second, they have learned ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 23, 2014
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(Phys.org) —A team of researchers working at the University of Tokyo has at long last uncovered the mysterious mechanism by which gender is determined in the silkworm (and other lepidoterans). In their paper published in ...
