The molecular secret of ageing could have been something boring like actin. Is it just a coincidence that it's also cool?
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?
The molecular secret of ageing could have been something boring like actin. Is it just a coincidence that it's also cool?
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4 comments:
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.
I didn't know there where labs that studied loading controls.
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"
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.
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