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In 1952, Stanley Miller filled two flasks with chemicals assumed to be present on the primitive Earth, connected the flasks with rubber tubes and introduced some electrical sparks as a stand-in for lightning. The now famous experiment showed what amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could easily be generated from this primordial stew. But despite that seminal experiment, neither he nor others were able to take the next step: that of showing how life’s code could come from such humble beginnings.

By working with the simplest amino acids and elementary RNAs, physicists led by Rockefeller University’s Albert J. Libchaber, head of the Laboratory of Experimental Condensed Matter Physics, have now generated the first theoretical model that shows how a coded genetic system can emerge from an ancestral broth of simple molecules. “All these molecules have different properties and these properties define their interactions,” says first author Jean Lehmann, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, whose work appears in the June issue of PLoS One. “What are the constraints that allow these molecules to self-organize into a code? We can play with that.”

(via savagemike)

severne:

Microsoft filed a patent two years ago for widely used methods for determining evolutionary relatedness, causing disbelief and apprehension among researchers.

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Researchers at Uppsala University have found that the protein coding parts of a gene are packed in special nucleosomes. The same type of packaging is found in the roundworm C elegans, which is a primeval relative of humans. The mechanism can thereby be traced back a billion years in time, according to the study presented in the journal Genome Research. Human genes are packed in nucleosomes, which contain epigenetic signals directing how the genes are to be used. The cell nucleus contains DNA, which is wound around proteins to form units called nucleosomes, not unlike pearls on a string. Genes on average contain ten protein coding units called exons. Previously there was no known correlation between nucleosomes and exons . New results show that nucleosomes are placed over exons. This means that the area containing the protein code is packed in discrete units. These results are presented by a research team at Uppsala University, led by Professor Claes Wadelius at the Department of Genetics and Pathology and Professor Jan Komorowski at the Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics as well as University of Warsaw.

Epigenetics is a cellular memory which identifies a cell’s identity and way to respond to the environment. Epigenetic signals control genes in a flexible manner. Each genetic package, or pearl on the string, has an epigenetic signal indicating how active it is. In the present study it was shown that there is a previously undiscovered epigenetic mark on protein coding parts of the gene.

“A gene can be read in several ways and create different proteins. We have now demonstrated that there is an epigenetic control that determines which parts of the gene that are read,” says Claes Wadelius.

The article calls them all Arabs, but at least one of them (and maybe two of them) are Persians, and not Arabs.

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You’ve heard of Louis Pasteur and George Washington Carver, no doubt. And probably Joseph Priestley, one of the founders of modern chemistry. Names like Antoine Lavoisier, John Dalton, and Amadeo Avogadro may even bring a twinkle of recognition to the eye for their famous roles in establishing chemistry as a modern science. But what about Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (“Rhazes”)? Or Jabir ibn Hayyan (“Geber”)? Or Abu Jusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi. Huh?

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NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft. “Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,” said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.”

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“The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare,” said Dr. Carl Pilcher, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute which co-funded the research.

From the article…

Our genome is constantly under attack from things like UV light and toxins, which can damage or even break DNA strands and ultimately lead to cancer and other diseases. Scientists have known for a long time that when DNA is damaged, a key enzyme sets off a cellular ‘alarm bell’ to alert the cell to start the repair process, but until recently little was known about how the cell detects and responds to this alarm. In a study published today in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have identified a whole family of proteins capable of a direct response to the alarm signal. […]