All posts tagged: RNA

Continent formation may have set the stage for life on Earth

Continent formation may have set the stage for life on Earth

Published by Jenni Sidey

Long before forests, fish, or even single cells, Earth may have needed something as unglamorous as growing continents to make life possible. A study in Terra Nova argues that the planet’s earliest continental crust did more than reshape the surface. In addition, it may have acted as a chemical regulator, drawing down dangerously high levels of boron from ancient oceans. Eventually, this helped create conditions that favored the chemistry behind life’s beginnings. That idea turns on a delicate balance. Boron has long been considered useful in prebiotic chemistry because borate can help stabilize ribose, a fragile sugar tied to RNA, the molecule many scientists think came before DNA. Yet boron is only helpful in the right range. Too little may have made it irrelevant. Too much may have pushed surface waters into forms that life could not use. “What we’re talking about is a geological control system for Earth’s surface chemistry,” said Dr. Brendan Dyck, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences at UBC Okanagan’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science. “The growth of …

Samples From Distant Asteroid Contain All DNA and RNA Building Blocks

Samples From Distant Asteroid Contain All DNA and RNA Building Blocks

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech In June 2019, a Japanese spacecraft called Hayabusa2 touched down on Ryugu, a 3,000-foot asteroid some 185 million miles from Earth. It then proceeded to fire a metal bullet at the surface, dislodging enough material to scoop up with a special “sampling horn” to take back home to our planet. Scientists have been poring over the extremely rare samples ever since to study the near-Earth asteroid with the hope of learning about how the building blocks of planets evolved over time — and just maybe how life on our planet first came to be. The latest findings, published in the journal Nature Astronomy by a team of researchers in Japan, tell a fascinating story: Ryugu appears to contain all the necessary ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth. The conclusion supports the theory that errant space rocks like Ryugu could have brought life to Earth billions of years ago. “Their detection in Ryugu strongly …

Every building block of DNA and RNA has been found on an asteroid

Every building block of DNA and RNA has been found on an asteroid

Published by Jenni Sidey

A rock measuring 900 meters is on a journey through our solar system, providing what is arguably one of the strongest pieces of evidence yet that life originated from outside of planet Earth. Scientists from a Japanese research group published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy. They verified, through analyses of material taken from the asteroid Ryugu, that all five nucleobases—the molecular components that contain the genetic information of both DNA and RNA—exist in all samples from Ryugu. This was not totally unexpected. Over two years ago, when uracil was discovered in one of the Ryugu samples, a more complete picture began to emerge. Now, there is confirmation of five nucleobases in total: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil. These originated from less than one teaspoon of asteroidal material that has traveled over 300 million kilometers to Earth. According to Prof. Toshiki Koga, from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the senior author of this study, the existence of these nucleobases means that “primitive asteroids may be capable of synthesizing and …

RNA strand that can almost self-replicate may be key to life’s origins

RNA strand that can almost self-replicate may be key to life’s origins

Published by skeptic

Artist’s depiction of QT45 (based on AlphaFold3 prediction) overlayed on a microscopy image of the frozen environment that aids RNA replication Elfy Chiang, microscopy image by James Attwater According to the RNA world hypothesis, life began when RNA molecules evolved the ability to make more copies of themselves. Now we have discovered an RNA molecule that is almost capable of this – it can carry out the key steps involved, just not all at once. “It’s been a long quest to get to the point where you can convince yourself that RNA has the capacity to make itself under the right conditions. I think this shows that it is possible,” says Philipp Holliger at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. In living cells, proteins carry out key tasks such as catalysing chemical reactions, and the recipes for making them are stored in double-stranded DNA molecules. RNA is a chemical cousin of DNA that usually exists in the form of single strands. It isn’t as good for storing information as DNA because it …

New research links the heart to the brain, nerves, and immune defenses

New research links the heart to the brain, nerves, and immune defenses

Published by Jenni Sidey

Arteries can narrow with fatty buildup. Blood struggles to move. Oxygen drops. A heart attack can follow, and it remains the world’s top killer. Researchers at the University of California San Diego say the usual way of studying a heart attack misses a key point. The heart does not act alone. In Cell, UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences scientists; led by Postdoctoral Scholar Saurabh Yadav and Assistant Professor Vineet Augustine; describe a linked system that ties the heart to the brain, nerves, and immune defenses. Their work builds a new picture of what happens after a myocardial infarction, also called an MI. Instead of treating the heart as an isolated organ, you can view a heart attack as a body-wide event that sets off a fast chain of signals. A heart attack sends messages your brain can hear The team describes the body as having internal sensing, much like sight and hearing. Just as eyes and ears convert light and sound into signals the brain can use, a damaged heart can send information …

RNA from mummified woolly mammoth is the oldest ever recovered

RNA from mummified woolly mammoth is the oldest ever recovered

Published by skeptic

biologist: A scientist involved in the study of living things. cell: (in biology) The smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. Typically too small to see with the unaided eye, it consists of a watery fluid surrounded by a membrane or wall. Depending on their size, animals are made of anywhere from thousands to trillions of cells. Most organisms, such as yeasts, molds, bacteria and some algae, are composed of only one cell.  colleague: Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member. degrade: To break down into smaller, simpler materials — as when wood rots or as a flag that’s left outdoors in the weather will fray, fade and fall apart. (in chemistry) To break down a compound into smaller components. DNA: (short for deoxyribonucleic acid) A long, double-stranded and spiral-shaped molecule inside most living cells that carries genetic instructions. It is built on a backbone of phosphorus, oxygen, and carbon atoms. In all living things, from plants and animals to microbes, these instructions tell cells which molecules to make. focus: (in …

Human sperm RNA changes with age, study finds

Human sperm RNA changes with age, study finds

Published by Jenni Sidey

According to research from a team at the University of Utah Health and the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, while fatherhood at an older age is becoming increasingly normalized due to more men becoming fathers later in their lives, past studies have revealed that there are negative risks associated with increasing father age for their children. The studies link higher rates of stillbirth, higher rates of obesity, and other health-related issues to older fatherhood, yet the cause of these increased risks has not been fully understood until now. The article published in The EMBO Journal identifies the key component associated with aging sperm: the RNA associated with it. Through this study, researchers were able to find that there are significant changes in the RNA associated with sperm as males advance through life. They obtained the data from both mice and humans, and the age-related patterns of the RNA in both species are the same, which indicates that the RNA associated with sperm is preserved across species, thus indicating a “clock” for sperm growth …