RNA developments

Back in 1953, scientists James Watson and Francis Crick figured out that the DNA molecule was composed of millions of little paired chemical connections called nucleotides. The nucleotides were like rungs of a ladder that held together two vastly long strands of phosphate-sugar.
But the ladder of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is not straight and rigid like you would think of a ladder. It's a twisty, floppy thing that spirals ever onward as it develops. It's a kind of spiral staircase upon which life has ascended from one phase to another over the last few millions or billions of years.
As the DNA double-helix molecule evolves, it keeps flopping over on itself, like a pile of spaghetti, because that's the only thing it can do in its confined little nucleus world.
But I'm not here to tell you about a can of worms or a pile of spaghetti. What fascinates me at this moment is the article I just read in The Scientist magazine by Dr.Anna Maria Pyle.

Dr. Pyle wrote about RNA in the September issue. RNA is a complex molecule similar to DNA. It's only half as wide, so to speak, being a single strand instead of double. It lollygags around the nucleus and unzips DNA down the middle, to assist the DNA in its replication and its mutagenic experiments . So thanks to RNA, life goes on, and it keeps changing as it goes.
Or at least that's my understanding of it so far. Of course the whole dam thing is much more complicated than that. Like I said, it's a can of worms, or a pile of spaghetti.
Dr. Pyle, though, along with other chemists, microbiologists and God-knows-what-all-ists across the world, are conducting work beneath their electron microscopes to unravel those piles of nucleic material and make some sense of their workings. I say "make some sense," meaning that they seek to explain the intricate processes of life that take place within the genomes. The DNAs and RNAs already make sense, being endowed as they are by their creator with certain inalienable characteristics, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of chromosomes.

Her September report expands our understanding of how RNA (ribonucleic acid) folds, and how it serves as a scaffold and facilitator in the cell environment. Dr. Pyle writes: "...there is a time in the life of every cell when even the most important RNA has to be refolded, disassembled or recycled so that something new can happen."

So, its somewhat like human politics. In the microcosm and the microcosm, pretty much the same thing is going on everywhere.
But I digress. Getting back to the nuclear heart of the matter, Watson and Crick had discovered that DNA strands were held together by paired nucleotides, those rungs of the ladder I mentioned earlier. What scientists are finding now is that there are other ways (besides the G,A,T, and C ladder-rung links) that the DNAs and RNAs can hook up in new combinations; they can connect by crossings with the long vertical (sugar-phosphate) strands as well.

Dr. Pyle writes in her September report about "genetic elements that jump around, copying and inserting themselves into new genomic locations and new hosts. Through this process, they bring new genes with them, or they chop up long genes into multiple pieces that can be used in various combinations, potentially leading to great diversity of expressed protein types..."

A very expressive chain of events, is this thing we call Life.

In other news, I have been wondering for a while now about the so-called "junk DNA" that constitutes most of our human genome. Its all the genetic material that they haven't figured out yet what it does. Although Dr. Anna Maria Pyle does not mention junk DNA, she does make this curious statement at the end of her article:

"We now know from the human genome project and from studies of the "transcriptome" that the vast majority of our DNA does not encode proteins at all; rather, it encodes RNA. RNA is far more important in biology than any of us imagined even five years ago."

I thought so too.
I have fictionalized, and personified, some of these adventurous RNA expeditions in my new novel, Glass Chimera, a story that includes a subnucleic tale about Cap'n Dean Gene and his crew of amino-angling sailors aboard the HMS RuNAbout. In my episode, Cap'n Dean takes on a cocky new recruit named Henry Globin, as they're cruising around inside the antagonist's (a guy named Mick) body. Imagine that.