DNA Surprises: Gene Research Goes into High Gear

Thanks to Snowcrash for pointing to this CIT newsrelease that details new discoveries in "gene interaction."

The difficulty lies in the fact that two genes can pair up in a gigantic number of ways. If an organism has a genome of 20,000 genes, for example, the total number of pairwise combinations is a staggering total of 200 million possible interactions.

Researchers can indeed perform experiments to see what happens when the two genes interact, but 200 million is an enormous number of experiments, says Weiwei Zhong, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. "The question is whether we can prioritize which experiments we should do in order to save a lot of time."

....a genetic-interaction network provides a faster and better way at determining how certain genes interact. Such a network also provides information about whether anyone has ever done an experiment to determine the interaction of two particular genes in one of several species.

"This process works like a matchmaking service for the genes," says Zhong. "It provides you with candidate matches that most likely will be interacting genes, based upon a number of specified features."

The benefit, she adds, is that biologists do not need to do a huge number of random experiments to verify if two genes indeed interact. Therefore, instead of the experimenter having to run 20,000 experiments to see if two genes randomly chosen from the genome of a 20,000-gene organism interact, they might get by with 10 to 50 experiments.

"The beneft is that you can be through in a month instead of years," says Sternberg Read the entire report here. Hat tip Biosingularity Blog.

The next story deals with advances in developing transgenic plants--getting plants to make proteins from other species--in this instance getting tobacco plants to make human albumin. This is from a Bio.com newsrelease:

Agricultural engineer, Alicia Fernández San Millán, has developed a novel technique in Spain - plastidial transformation, in order to produce, in a recombinant form, human albumin from tobacco plants. According to her PhD thesis, plastidial transformation is an economically viable alternative, as it enables increasing the levels of HSA by between 10 and a 100 times, compared to levels obtained by nuclear transformation. Read the entire newfeature for more information.

The following story deals with "junk DNA", the 98% of all human DNA that does not code for protein. Buried within the junk DNA is hidden treasure--epigenetic control sequences that influence the gene expression of the 2% of coding DNA.

The notion that mutations in enhancers play a role in human disease progression has been difficult to confirm because usually enhancers are located in the 98 percent of the human genome that does not code for protein, termed non-coding DNA. Unlike DNA sequences that code for protein, non-coding DNA, sometimes referred to as "junk" DNA, follows few rules for organization and sequence patterns and therefore is more difficult to study.

"The difficulty with human genetic approaches to common disease is that we lack the power to precisely localize DNA sequences that are associated with disease, often leaving us immense stretches of DNA to look at," says one of the study's corresponding authors, Andy McCallion, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the McKusick-Nathans Institute. Most often one is limited to looking in the most obvious places, which may not yield the best results. "Until now," he says, "we've only been able to look under the lamplights for the car keys."

....The system is a significant advance over current methods in this model species, allowing researchers to study more sequences in a shorter period of time. Read the entire news report here.

This report discusses a discovery of a gene variant--always think "hapmap" when hearing the term "gene variant"--that affects the onset of cancer.

Normally our genes have to be divided into two perfectly identical copies when a cell divides. The unfortunate variant causes a defect in the division of the genetic material (mitosis), which means that a daughter cell may get too few or too many genes.

If a daughter cell does not receive a gene that prevents cancer, a so-called tumour suppressor gene, then a cancer can grow. One defence mechanism against cancer is for a cell that gets faulty genes to commit suicide (apoptosis).

The defect caused by the unfortunate variant when it divides the genes is so tiny that the suicide mechanism does not detect the fault, which allows the cell to continue its growth into a cancer. Read the rest here.

Finally, here is a glimpse into the distant past, toward the possible origin of life on earth. This Eurekalert newsrelease discusses experiments attempting to delve into possible origins of the DNA-RNA encoding system that supports all known life.

This "evolutionary conversion" provides a modern-day snapshot of how life as we understand it may have first evolved out of the earliest primordial mix of RNA-like molecules-sometimes referred to as the "pre-RNA world"-into a more complex form of RNA-based life (or the "RNA world") and eventually to cellular life based on DNA and proteins. Nucleic acids are large complex molecules that store and convey genetic information, but can also function as enzymes.

While the transfer of sequence information between two different classes of nucleic acid-like molecules-between RNA and DNA, for example-is straightforward because it relies on the one-to-one correspondence of the double helix pairing, transferring catalytic function is significantly more difficult because function cannot be conveyed sequentially. The present study demonstrates that the "evolutionary conversion" of an RNA enzyme to a DNA enzyme with the same function is possible, however, through the acquisition of a few critical mutations.

The study was released in an advance online version of the journal Chemistry & Biology. Read more here.

This posting covers only a small cross section of ongoing genetic research. Al Fin has covered several of these topics previously. All of those past postings are available via the archives on the sidebar. Most people would feel overwhelmed if they had attempted to look deeply into any of these reports. No one is expected to know everything about everything, after all.