Scientists have made a huge octopi breakthrough, revealing more of their characteristics and new data about cuttlefish and squids. The new study reveals that these sea creatures are far more intelligent than scientists have ever thought. They are well-known for their incredible escape methods, using remarkable techniques of squeezing into crowded areas and managing to open up jars. Nevertheless, this study indicates that octopi, squids, and cuttlefish can ignore their DNA information.
- Researchers have made an amazing octopi breakthrough about RNA editing.
- They revealed that octopi, squids and cuttlefish have particular methods through which they edit their RNA.
- They do this to create new proteins which are not encoded in their DNA.
In molecular biology, cells transform DNA sequences into RNA. RNA develops the proteins which are meant to define the traits. Sometimes, these cells might edit the RNA by eliminating adenosine and adding inosine instead. Cephalopods can modify RNA to create new proteins. RNA altering allows an octopus gene to generate different proteins for the same DNA.
Thus, cephalopods ignore RNA and develop it by their own rules. The new research unveiled that cephalopods tend to edit their RNA, doing it frequently than other species do. Cuttlefish, squid, and octopi do not preserve their genetic instructions in the DNA, and they are not following them to the letter. Nevertheless, they use enzymes to retrieve particular adenosine RNA bases. They retrieve some of As out of the Us, Gs, Ts and As of RNA.
These RNA bases which code for protein and substitute them with another base known as inosine. This process is called RNA editing. The procedure is sometimes used to recode proteins in several species of animals. Nevertheless, octopi, squids, and cuttlefish can modify RNA base pairs in more than half of their transcribed genes. When scientists developed a study to characterize and quantify the scope of RNA altering across all cephalopods, they unveiled that the genetic technique used has restrained the evolution of the cephalopod genome.
Vertebrate cells can edit their RNA, but humans rarely do this. Humans have about 20,000 genes among which only a few dozen preserved RNA editing sites which encode functional proteins. Squids have 20,000 genes, too, but approximately they have 11,000 active RNA altering sites which affect the proteme. Many of these are preserved.
Eli Eisenberg, a biophysicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel who is also the co-author of the study, argued that octopi use this technique to develop proteins which are not encoded in their DNA.
Image courtesy of: wikipedia
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