Dynamic Cancer Protein and Flexible tRNA

Here are two interesting research items. First, from the biological researcher who won the Sexiest Name of 2005 Biolabs Contest, we learn about an exciting new method of monitoring the dynamic movement of nuclear protein in a cell. According to Purdue's Sophie Lelievre,

"When you look at cells that don't yet have a specific function - aren?t differentiated, compared to fully differentiated cells, which are now capable of functioning as breast cells - the organization of proteins in the nucleus varies tremendously," Lelièvre said. "Then looking at how the proteins in malignant cells are distributed, it's a totally different pattern compared to normal differentiated cells."

The research team's study on the imaging technique and its use in 3-D mapping and analysis of nuclear protein distribution is published this week online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ultimately, the scientists want to use the technique to determine not only if a lesion is malignant but also the exact kind of cancer, how likely it is to spread and the most appropriate treatment for a particular patient.

"The major problem exists in the pre-malignant stages of abnormal cells in determining whether cancer will develop, what type and how invasive it will be," Lelièvre said. "The decision then is whether to treat or not to treat and how to proceed in these preliminary stages because only a certain percentage of these patients will ultimately develop cancer.

"We want to use this technique to identify subtypes of cells within lesions that potentially could become more aggressive forms of cancer."

Very exciting news for cancer research. I wish them well in their rapid development of a workable method for hospital labs.

The second report sheds light on why sometimes A-U and G-U pairs in transfer RNA are sometimes mismatched as A-C or G-U pairs in the nucleotide chain. William McClain at UW Madison explains:

Scientists have long known that transfer RNA - which adds amino acids to a growing chain during protein synthesis - holds a surprising secret when it comes to its base pairs: occasionally, instead of the expected A-U or G-C pairs, there exists instead a mispair of A-C or G-U. However, the role and importance of mispairs has never been well understood, says McClain.

McClain, who has spent his career investigating how transfer RNA selects specific amino acids during protein synthesis, was curious about how mispairs affect the function of RNA. In the study reported in PNAS, he altered the position of a G-U mispair in a bacterial plasmid - by literally moving the mispair up and down the molecule’s cloverleaf structure -- and demonstrated that the mutation increases the ability of the RNA to accept amino acids and improves its efficiency at moving through the ribosome, the cellular organelle where translation occurs. In fact, removing the mispair or repairing it to make it a correct matched pair inactivated the molecule completely.

"The wobble pairs fit together at an angle and the bonds are much less stable than matched pairs," McClain explains. "This makes the molecule more likely to come undone, and therefore more reactive."

This is crucial because DNA and RNA molecules are not the static, flat images that are depicted in textbooks, McClain notes. "They flex, move and come apart all the time," he says. "And mispairs promote this movement. My interpretation is that nature conserves these mispairs because they enhance protein synthesis."

This research is published in NAS Proceedings.

The textbooks can never keep up with the research. Even the journals cannot keep up. Only electronic information methods can even try. The quantity of information being generated by modern bioresearch labs around the world is immense. Correlating and making sense of it all is virtually impossible. I suspect that many information scientists have got their hopes pinned on the development of more capable machine intelligences, to data mine the research, sort it out, interpret it, then make suggestions for fruitful areas of future investigation. Because it is not just bioresearch that is exploding, it is science and technology research in general.

This is the legacy of Aristotle, Avicenna, Galileo, and Newton. It is a prolific but fragile generator of knowledge. It rests upon a narrow foundation. That is the subject of this blog, the foundation that makes the knowledge generation possible. Many things try to destroy the foundation, from religion to mass media to political correctness. But the foundation supports us all, including those who try to destroy it.