Synthetic RNA-based switches

By: James V. Kohl | Published on: April 12, 2017

Synthetic RNA-based switches for mammalian gene expression control Current Opinion in Biotechnology, Volume 48, December 2017, Pages 54–60

If you wait until December, 2017 to see this article in print, you will probably be among the last of those to have missed a two decades-old paradigm shift.

The fact that these researchers created synthetic RNA-based switches attests to the fact that natural selection for energy-dependent codon optimality links what organisms eat to energy-dependent RNA-mediated amino acid substitutions. The substitutions help to ensure protein folding chemistry links the amino acids to the functional structure of supercoiled DNA in all organized genomes via the physiology of pheromone-controlled reproduction.

Minimally, what is known to all serious scientists about the biophysically constrained protein folding chemistry links Darwin’s “conditions of life” to the energy-dependent creation of all morphological and behavioral phenotypes.

For review, see: ‘Minimal’ cell raises stakes in race to harness synthetic life: Craig Venter’s creation comes as CRISPR gene-editing methods provide alternative ways to tinker with life’s building blocks. 

“This old Richard Feynman quote, ‘what I cannot create, I do not understand’, this principle is now served,” says Martin Fussenegger, a synthetic biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. “You can add in genes and see what happens.”

With nearly all of its nutrients supplied through growth media, syn3.0’s essential genes tend to be those involved in cellular chores such as making proteins, copying DNA and building cellular membranes. Astoundingly, Venter says that his team could not identify the function of 149 of the genes in syn3.0’s genome, many of which are found in other life forms, including humans. “We don’t know about a third of essential life, and we’re trying to sort that out now,” he says.

This has blown Fussenegger away. “We’ve sequenced everything on this planet, and we still don’t know 149 genes that are most essential for life!” he says. “This is the coolest thing I want to know.”

It should have long ago become obvious that the genes most essential to life are the genes that link the energy-dependent de novo creation of G protein-coupled receptors to ATP-dependent RNA synthesis.

The current issue of Discover Magazine features “Heroes of Science” without mention of any who helped to link the anti-entropic virucidal energy of ultraviolet light from endogenous RNA interference to all biodiversity via the physiology of reproduction.

If not for the mention of Rosalind Franklin, whose work with the tobacco mosaic virus caused her to doubt the ridiculous representation of the static DNA double helix, subscribers would never know that
1) Thomas Hunt Morgan,
2) Ernest Schrodinger,
3) Bruce McEwen,
and
4) Theodosius Dobzhansky
linked sunlight and ATP from the biosynthesis of RNA to the amino acid substitutions in supercoiled DNA that link chromosomal inheritance from the physiology of reproduction to all biophysically constrained biologically-based cause and effect in all living genera.
Overall, Discover Magazine’s “Heroes of Science” are biologically uninformed theorists who failed to link the epigenetic landscape to the physical landscape of supercoiled DNA, which protects all organized genomes from virus-driven energy theft and genomic entropy in the context of Darwin’s “conditions of life.”

In the same issue, an article on learning in plants links multipupose plant sensors to all biodiversity via RNA methylation and the physiology of reproduction in species from microbes to humans. See for instance: Multipurpose plant sensors startle scientists

Protein-protein interactions are energy-dependent and RNA-mediated.

See also: A conserved NAD+ binding pocket that regulates protein-protein interactions during aging

 


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