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Nicolle Rager Fuller / NSF
An artist's conception shows an RNA molecule, which may have served as an early form of life on Earth.
By Charles Choi
LiveScience
The human genome can generate molecular hoops similar in makeup to DNA that could potently interfere with genetic activity, researchers say.
These findings reveal there are secrets within the genomes of humans and other animals that scientists are still uncovering, and the old belief that life has useless junk DNA is more false than ever, scientists added.
Discovering more about circular versions of RNA (a molecule similar to DNA that can carry genetic information) could also lead to new ways of fighting diseases such as diabetes, brain tumors and Parkinson's disease, investigators added.
The human genome — the blueprint for human life — is made of DNA. From the genome, intermediate molecules known as RNA are created that help manufacture key biomolecules such as proteins, which then carry out cellular processes.
After international teams of researchers completely sequenced the human genome, they found about 95 percent of it unexpectedly did not code for proteins. Since this noncoding DNA initially seemed to have no known biological function, some scientists referred to it as junk DNA. [Unraveling the Human Genome: 6 Molecular Milestones]
However, over time, researchers have discovered this noncoding DNA can serve a wide variety of vital purposes. For instance, noncoding DNA can give rise to snippets of RNA known as micro-RNA that can suppress the so-called messenger RNA that normally helps manufacture proteins. This micro-RNA serves a key role in controlling genetic activity, and scientists are developing therapies based on micro-RNA to dampen harmful, malfunctioning genes.
Now researchers find the genomes of humans and other animals can generate circular RNA, highly stable rings that can sponge up micro-RNA, apparently keeping them from interfering with genetic activity if necessary.
"There seems to be a whole new layer of gene regulation," researcher Jørgen Kjems, a molecular biologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, told LiveScience.
For instance, Kjems and his colleagues found high levels of a circular RNA they dubbed ciRS-7 in the human and mouse brain. This molecule potently suppresses a micro-RNA named miR-7, which is found in everything from worms to humans. They also found a circular RNA known as Sry that is specific to testicles and targets a micro-RNA known as miR-138, suggesting that circular RNA might play a role in sex development.
In addition, when Nikolaus Rajewsky at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and his colleagues analyzed human, mouse and nematode worm RNA, they detected thousands of circular RNAs. These were often linked with specific tissues or developmental stages.
The micro-RNA miR-7 regulates a number of disease genes, including Parkinson's disease, brain tumors and diabetes. As such, learning more about circular RNAs "may provide a new treatment strategy for these diseases," Kjems said. Regulating the activity of miR-7 could reduce the activity of the genes causing these diseases, he explained.
Altogether, these findings suggest that circular RNAs form a large class of genetic regulators. It remains uncertain whether these molecules work alone or whether they act by combining with other compounds, such as RNA-binding proteins.
The researchers next plan to introduce these circular molecules in animals "to see their effect on disease development, and from there, design drugs towards the diseases," Kjems said.
The scientists detailed their findings in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
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Well @!$%#. I just started working with micro-RNA regulation and now it looks like I have to go back and start looking at circular RNA now as well! Seriously, can the rest of us just publish a damn paper before the rules of genetic regulation get re-written and we have to start from scratch?
Cool though! My lab has recently identified a series of RNases (protein enzymes that degrade RNA molecules) that are increased in several diseases from cancer to Alzheimer's. The cross-talk between these RNases, miRNAs, and ciRNAs may just lie at the heart of many untreatable conditions as well as how the body defends itself from certain retroviruses. It was recently suggested that RNA molecules and RNAse enzymes (among other things) can be excreted from cells in what are called exosomes - tiny balls of cell membrane containing cytoplasmic molecules - which actually fuse with distant cells and may actually regulate that cell's activity from afar. Exosomes may be specifically targeted to certain cell types or organs and represent another pathway for disease regulation. It really is a very exciting time in cellular and molecular biology - now only if the NIH would increase funding, laboratories would be able to investigate these phenomena!
I would rate calling the non-protein codes 'Junk' DNA right up there with the whole 'God Particle' debacle. Both provided sound bites for the evening news, and some finger pointing from the Luddites. We've always known there was redundancy in the genetic code, so it shouldn't be surprising that there may have been some utility to sections that didn't seem to have a purpose. Lesson learned. . .hopefully.
This is the best bit of evidence to date that busts the myth of so-called "junk DNA" (a.k.a., "non-coding DNA"), which the Frankencloners use to promote the big lie, which is that Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) is safe, reliable, and flawless . . .
The reality is that SCNT is as strange and bizarre as it is imperfect, and the reason is that molecular biologists, geneticists, and other scientists know considerably less about genetic algorithms than they tell the public . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic-cell_nuclear_transfer
One of the easiest ways to understand this is to consider what Bayer CropScience, Dupont, Monsanto, and others have done over the past few decades to the wild bee, butterfly, and moth populations, which have been decimated by the combination of Frankenchemicals and Frankenplants, where examples include altering the basic genetic algorithms of corn by inserting snippets of insecticide (Bt-corn, Starlink corn, and so forth), genetically modifying rice in similarly disturbing ways (LL601 rice), and on and on and on, with the list of Frankencrops expanding at an accelerating rate, since the Frankenscientists essentially have no oversight or regulatory hurdles to prevent them from adulterating anything and everything in one way or another, because through a combination of intense lobbying and a revolving door highly lucrative post-bureaucratic and post-legislative job policy they control the Congress, USDA, and FDA, where the current focus of the Frankenscientists is on creating Frankenclones of food producing animals with the goal being to have the USDA and FDA grant these abominations "Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS)" status, as well as by act of Congress preventing the requirement of listing Frankenclone ingredients and products on consumer food labels, which is happening with Frankensalmon and Frankencattle, with one of the goals being to introduce Frankensalmon into the wild which, as already is happening with corn and rice, soon will adulterate all the natural salmon currently existing on the planet . . .
Approximately half a century ago, there were flocks of bees and butterflies in the early spring and summer, and then once again in the early fall as the butterflies migrated to the Deep South, Mexico, Central America, and South America, but now at the dawn of the early-21st century seeing just one bee or butterfly on a sunny day is a luxury, because they are gone and are unlikely to return so long as the Frankenscientists continue to adulterate and to pollute the environment and the natural genomes of what once were native plants . . .
In the 1950s if you had clover in the yard, when the clover was blooming there would so many honeybees and bumble bees that you had to walk around the clover to avoid being stung by the honeybees, but today you might see one bumble bee every other day or perhaps once a week, and there are no honeybees other than the tiny miniature bees that are not much bigger than a common housefly . . .
The problem with tinkering with genetic algorithms is that while the individual components are extraordinarily simple {Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine}, the ways they interact based on proximity, localized conditions, and so forth and so on are mind-bogglingly complex, and the typical consequence for some people is that due to inherent weaknesses or flaws in their overall genetic algorithms these people become sickly and develop unusual diseases which their bodies cannot correct intuitively . . .
Most modern medicines do nothing more than make tiny adjustments locally in the human body that make it possible for genetic algorithms to become self-correcting for errors, flaws, or mistakes, which is a good thing that saves lives and eases pain and suffering, but doing the opposite--which is what the Frankencloners and others are doing vigorously--undoes much of the good, with one of the most obvious results being the epidemic of childhood asthma, diabetes, and obesity, which for all practical purposes started in the early-1980s when the food and beverage industry in the US (a) switched from using pure cane sugar to using high-fructose corn syrup (which did not exist anywhere on this planet until it was concocted in a research laboratory in the US in the late-1950s and then made commercially viable using an high-temperature catalytic Frankenprocess developed by demented Japanese biochemists in the 1970s) and (b) switched from natural cattle and other livestock husbandry to using high-intensity feedlots (which among other things for cattle included feeding them parts of dead cattle and other animal carcasses and high quantities of grains, but primarily corn, which dramatically changed the pH of their gastrointestinal systems in a specific way that not only encourages but also promotes the proliferation of vastly gnarly E. coli bacteria, which soon led to the first deadly E. coli food poisoning outbreaks, which now happen on a regular basis for similar reasons with salmonella, noroviruses, and a virtual festival influenza viruses due to the Chinese in Guangdong province--the global epicenter for gnarly influenza virus production--literally eating everything in all the biological kingdoms in bowls of Happy Soup, which creates gnarly influenza viruses that kill approximately 35,000 to 50,000 of our fellow citizens each year and make millions of us sick, and so forth and so on) . . .
The Frankenscientists and their sneaky weasel cohorts are as out of control as the current Congress, and the facts of the matter are (a) that the common folk of our great nation are their sworn enemies and (b) that the Frankenscientists and their sneaky weasel cohorts and the Congress hate and despise us so much that their primary mission in life is to contaminate, poison, and toxify our genetic algorithms and natural bodily fluids so that they can steal all our money and then kill us, but only after causing us great pain and suffering, really . . .
Really! :-o
So the discovery of new types of CiRNA proves that genetically modified crops are bad...because there used to be more butterflies?
Also, did you even read the Wiki article you linked? SCNT has nothing to do with genetically-modified foods, because it copies the genome, it doesn't modify it (the entire genome, including the "what-we-no-longer-think-of-as-junk-DNA" setions). If you want to rant about genetic engineering, at least get the processes straight.
Good to get all that off your chest, eh?
@yeahbuhwha?:
You wrote this:
One might suppose that whether SCNT has something to do with genetically modified organisms (GMO) used as food depends on the way one defines "genetically modified organisms (GMO)", but the thinking here in the sound isolation studio is that since, for example, SCNT is used to create Frankencattle and Frankencows, which in turn based on the current scheme become the parents of Frankenclone sons (beef) and daughters (milk and other dairy products), SCNT has everything to do with genetically modified food, where efforts in this regard are ongoing and are being "reviewed" by the FDA and USDA with the general expectation that everything will be give Generally Approved As Safe (GRAS) status, which in turn removes the requirement that information be provided which specifically identifies the resulting beef and dairy products as being either (a) meat from the progeny of Frankenclones or (b) milk and other dairy products from the progeny of Frankenclones, so that the consumer literally has no clues regarding what the sneaky weasels put in the package or container . . .
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15268790
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/26/scientists-all-clear-cloned-meat
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2005/04/67175
[NOTE: This is from 2006, and it has the caveat "The information on this page is provided for reference purposes only. It was current when produced, but is no longer maintained and may now be outdated". However, it is sufficiently current to provide a few clues regarding the lengths to which Frankenscientists are willing to stretch facts to fit agendas, where the biggest lie is found in the last sentence . . . ]
[SOURCE: http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/NewsEvents/FDAVeterinarianNewsletter/ucm108131.htm ]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_%28sheep%29#Death
The simplistic description of SCNT is that an unfertilized egg is hollowed by removing its nucleus so that it becomes the host shell, and the nucleus of a donor cell is extracted from the donor cell and then inserted into the now hollowed host shell, where according to Frankenscientists everything is done flawlessly, such that as you suggested the entire genome is all that is swapped or inserted into the unfertilized host egg, which sounds spanky but it not what actually happens . . .
What actually happens is that the hollowing procedure where the nucleus is removed from the unfertilized egg inevitably leaves a bit of what one might call "genetic residue", and the nucleus extraction from the donor cell also includes a bit of genetic residue, and it was this "genetic residue" that Frankenscientists dismissed as being "junk DNA" or "non-coding DNA", since arbitrarily attributing no value or functionality to it tended to support the false argument that everything was perfect . . .
The information is not difficult to find, but you need to know to look for it, and what you find is that the results of SCNT are so unpredictable that it is considerably more likely to produce horrible mutations than it is to produce a clone which at least for a while appears to be "normal" . . .
Another fact is that even with clones which initially appear to be "normal", they nearly always have shortened lives compared to naturally reproduced organisms, and they tend to have serious medical problems as they age, where some of the problems do not appear initially but instead emerge over time, which depending on the type of organism can take years or decades, hence until the cloned entity has been observed and studied for a long time, which certainly should include observing and studying the progeny of such clones, all one can do is guess, which is the problem, because a key aspect of the guessing involves using hypotheses regarding the way the human body reacts and responds after consuming the clone, items produced by the clone, the sons and daughters of clones, and items produced by progeny of the clones . . .
In other words, the current view is that cloning dairy cows that produce high quantities of milk and then mating these cloned dairy cows to produce daughters that consequently produce high quantities of milk will result in a herd of cloned progeny that has significantly greater milk production capabilities, which sounds spanky except that nobody knows whether there are long term consequences for humans who consume the resulting milk and other dairy products, which in the grand scheme of everything makes it a strange and bizarre experiment conducted on the people of our great nation in the same way as high-fructose corn syrup is such a strange and bizarre experiment, performed primarily on infants, children, adolescents, and young adults, specifically without their informed consent, which in the grand scheme of everything makes it a patently evil experiment . . .
As explained in my earlier post, it certainly is a curiously odd coincidence that the incidences of asthma, diabetes, and obesity in children and young adults have increased steadily since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup into the food supply of our great nation, and the difference is most obvious to older people, since they know firsthand that there might have been one child with asthma, one child with diabetes, and one morbidly obese child in a typical elementary school in the 1950s, which is very different from today, where instead of being singletons, there are virtual festivals of children who have asthma, diabetes, and are morbidly obese . . .
Using genetically engineered (GE) and genetically modified organism (GMO) hormones like recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) have an affect not only on the cattle and dairy cows but also on the infants, children, teenagers, and adults who consume beef produced by the cattle and milk produced by dairy cows that are given one or more of these Frankenhormones . . .
Australia does not allow the use of rBGH, rBST, and IGF-1, and their cattle graze on grass rather than being fed huge quantities of grain (typically GMO/GE corn like Bt-corn and Monsanto's Roundup Ready® corn) in high-intensity feedlots, since at least until recently there were no high-intensity feedlot operations in Australia, and the same is the case with Australian dairy cows . . .
Australians consume as much beef and dairy products as Americans, yet there is a significantly lower incidence of obesity in Australia (30.6 percent for the US vs. 21.7 percent for Australia) . . .
[NOTE: High-fructose corn syrup is another significant factor in obesity rates, and it is no surprise that the obesity rate in the US is 50 to 200 percent higher than other countries, since the price of sugar is not arbitrarily increased in other countries, which has the consequence that other countries use sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup as the primary sweetener . . . ]
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity
Regarding the hypothesis about genetically engineered (GE) and genetically modified organisms (GMO) with respect to the modifications being as "perfect" as SCNT, this also is part of the big lie promoted by Frankenscientists, because the same thing happens, which specifically is that extra stuff travels along with whatever snippets of genetic algorithms are extracted from one organism and then inserted into another organism, with the result that the GE/GMO entity not only has the traits and characteristics the Frankenscientists intend them to have but also has extra traits and characteristics, where even if there were no extra traits and characteristics, the intended modifications are sufficiently strange and bizarre to cause problems for the people who consume such food products, where as an example the edible parts of Bt-corn contain the same insecticide as the non-edible parts, such that instead of eating natural corn, people are eating corn which has a built-in toxin (Bacillus thuringiensis [Bt]), and the human body as no ancestral knowledge of this type of corn, since it did not exist anywhere on this planet until recently, and the long term consequences on the human body of consuming this type of corn will not be known for decades, if not longer . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_maize#Bt_corn
Summarizing, I suggest that all his stuff is relevant with respect to what one might call the "extra bits" of genetic algorithms that tag along with every type of GMO/GE procedure and cloning process, which is a significant problem that is made all the easier to understand by the discovery that what once was considered arbitrarily to be "junk DNA' or "non-coding DNA" now is understood to be anything but "junk" and "non-coding", which is an elaborate way to explain that it does something, and the problem is that nobody currently alive on this planet actually knows what the "somethings" are over the long run, because none of this has existed for long enough to know its long term consequences . . .
Another way to put the realities into perspective is to consider the "scavenger hunt" game where players form teams and win the game by finding a specified list of things, where some of the things intentionally are a bit unusual, with an example being the motion picture "My Man Godfrey" from 1936, where each team was supposed to find a "forgotten man", which in modern terminology would be a "homeless man", except instead of each team needing to find a "forgotten man", consider that each team needs to find an albuterol sulfate rescue inhaler for asthmatics, a bottle of insulin and a syringe, and a morbidly obese person . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scavenger_hunt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Man_Godfrey
Until sometime beginning in the early-1980s, finding an albuterol sulfate rescue inhaler for asthmatics, a bottle of insulin and a syringe, and a morbidly obese person would require one to visit a pharmacy, clinic, or hospital, but at the dawn of the early-21st century one can find everything at virtually any elementary school during regular school hours, which is a clue to the real and tangible consequences of all this Frankenscience, where one of the most mind-boggling aspects of SCNT, which earns Mary Shelley (author of "Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus", circa 1818) a posthumous Nobel Prize for Precognition, is that once the donor nucleus is inserted into the host egg, a direct current pulse (a.k.a., an electric spark) is required as a trigger to cause the cloned embryo to begin dividing, really . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dolly_clone.svg
Really! :-o