Science Today

In order to create proteins, the protein-coding gene must be transcribed into RNA and in the so-called splicing process shortened to the correct template. Scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and Munich's Technical University have now discovered how the U2AF protein enables this process. The results have been published in the current edition of the journal Nature. Scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) along with their colleagues from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona have discovered how the U2AF protein enables the pre-mRNA to be spliced to form the mRNA, which serves as a template for protein synthesis in the body. Splicing requires the cooperation of different proteins, i.e. splicing factors. One such splicing factor, U2AF, was examined by the Munich scientists. It consists of two structural modules and binds to the RNA near the intron-exon ...

Researchers led by Vanderbilt's Roger Cone, Ph.D., have discovered a new member of a gene family that has powerful influences on pigmentation and the regulation of body weight. The gene is the third member of the agouti family. Two agouti genes have been identified previously in humans. One helps determine skin and hair color, and the other may play an important role in obesity and diabetes. The new gene, called agrp2, has been found exclusively in bony fish, including zebrafish, trout and salmon. The protein it encodes enables fish to change color dramatically to match their surroundings, the researchers report this week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "When my graduate student, Youngsup Song, discovered a third agouti protein in the fish pineal gland, an organ that regulates daily rhythms in response to light, we initially thought we had found the pathway that regulates hunger diurnally," said Cone, chair of the De...

It has been a basic principle of evolution for more than a century that plants and animals can adapt genetically in ways that help them better survive and reproduce. Now, in a paper to be published in the journal Science, University of Rochester biologist John Jaenike and colleagues document a clear example of a new mechanism for evolution. In previous well documented cases of evolution, traits that increase an animal's ability to survive and reproduce are conferred by favorable genes, which the animal passes on to its offspring. Jaenike's team has chronicled a striking example of a bacteria infecting an animal, giving the animal a reproductive advantage, and being passed from mother to children. This symbiotic relationship between host animal and bacteria gives the host animal a readymade defense against a hazard in its environment and thus has spread through the population by natural selection, the way a favorable gene would. Microscope image of drosophila fly with parasiti...