Taken together, the interaction of triplet substrate pools with RNA templates promotes uncoupling of an RNA’s sequence (i.e. information content, and associated folding tendencies) from its replicability, thereby enhancing RNA’s capacity to serve as an informational polymer.
i wonder what the effects of this would look like on a person compared to someone without triplet substrate pools
For instance, when binding templates, triplets incur a lower entropic cost per position compared to canonical mononucleotides (thus aiding copying of sequences rich in weakly pairing A and U bases),
Dose this imply that cellular functioning such as the repairing damaged skin could effectively be done quicker with triplet substrates?
When RNA is copied, one strand acts as a template, and a replicase ribozyme would accurately guide which letters are added to the strand under construction.
Similar to a chef making a recipe and someone at home following that recipe
The interaction between Yellow and dopamine might explain the protein’s effects on male mating success because dopamine acts as a modulator of male courtship drive in D. melanogaster (Zhang et al., 2016).
Dose this mean a fly in a lab setting could mate less than a true wild fruit fly? (assuming lab flies produce less dopamine compared to their wild counterpart)
which was perceived as a behavioral defect for decades, is caused by changes in the morphology of the structures used during mating. Other recent studies have also shown the importance of morphological structures for stickleback schooling (Greenwood et al., 2015), water strider walking (Santos et al., 2017), and cricket singing (Pascoal et al., 2014) behaviors.
Using this knowledge, I wonder if eye color could also effect the chances of mating in these fruit flies.
Video recordings of male flies with reduced yellow expression in dsx-expressing cells showed the same mating defect observed in y1 mutants: males seem to perform all courtship actions normally, but repeatedly failed to copulate (Video 5).
This leads me to question if females mate more to visual cues rather than chemical cues.
Another product of anthropogenic change is the evolution of pesticide resistance in a wide range of insects of economic and medical importance.
can this be used to reflect people's natural resistance to certain diseases?
What role can natural history play in our ability to understand these interactions with a view towards disease mitigation and treatment? In the past few decades, the importance of the gut microbiome for models of human health has grown.
kinda surprising that they could use something as small as these flies to study gut microbes, I wonder what type of tools they use to study this.
It is not clear why or how he came to breed them, but their short generation time and ease of rearing were probably very appealing attributes.
When it comes to model organisms, a short generation time is essential that way we can quickly see the results of potential crosses, another model organism that has a short generation time is the zebrafish
ematostella vectensis suggests that venom is already expressed in eggs and larvae of this species.
an example that this venom was not originally in the animal but was developed over a long period of time
Here, we tested Nematostella interactions with the grass shrimp Palaemonetes sp. and the killifish Fundulus heteroclitus at egg, planula, primary polyp, and adult life stages (Table 1). Grass shrimps are reportedly predators of Nematostella (Kneib, 1985; Kneib, 1988), however, in our observations, when encountering the tentacles of adult polyps of Nematostella burrowed in substrate, shrimps immediately ‘jumped’ away from the tentacles (Video 2).
Shows an in beaded instinct to flee when a certain amount of Nematostella is introduced even if they are not in actual danger.
Venom is often studied because the compounds it contains have the potential to be developed into new drugs. The jellyfish and coral relatives of Nematostella may also produce different venoms at different life stages
I always love it when venom is used to turn it into something the completely opposite of its intended purpose. goes to show that even something used to harm others, like venoms from snakes or toxins from tree frogs, can be used for medicine like horseshoe crab blood.