Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Another Nobel for Non-Coding RNA

By now you have heard that Blackburn, Greider and Szostak have won the Nobel for their work leading to the discovery of telomeres and telomerase - the eukaryotic solution to the end-replication problem. Other than gawking over "THE SECRET OF AGEING" and all the other shit journalists are copying and pasting into each other's newspapers, now would be a good time to take a moment and remember what a badass enzyme telomerase is. A cellular encoded reverse transcriptase, with structural homology to viral RTs, viral RNA polymerases and phage DNA polymerases. That is also composed of an ncRNA component which functions as a sort of a primer.

The molecular secret of ageing could have been something boring like actin. Is it just a coincidence that it's also cool?


4 comments:

Shawna said...

I'm a lurker, but I'm also in an actin lab, so I have to come out of hiding to say that actin isn't boring. On the other hand, I totally dig the RNA-world hypothes(es) and agree that telomerase is cool. That is all.

Anonymous said...

I didn't know there where labs that studied loading controls.

Kamel said...

And yet another Nobel involving non-coding RNA: The 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry is awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada E. Yonath, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome"

Bayman said...

No worries; actin is cool. I had a hard time picking an example of a molecule in the cell that's boring. Maybe it's scientists who think of actin as a loading control who are boring.