BIOL 200 Lecture Notes - Bioinformatics, Schizosaccharomyces Pombe, Neural Development
6 Apr 2012
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Document Summary
Through the discovery of these dsrna molecules capable of carrying out chromosomal rearrangement functions, it opened up a whole new window of research into new roles for rna within the cell. Rna actually has very important functions apart from being adaptors or reading sequences in protein synthesis. This leads to a chicken or egg problem; which came first, rna or dna/proteins. While dna is capable of faithfully keeping genetic information, it is not able to self- replicate itself so as to transmit information to daughter cells. Proteins, on the other hand, are excellent for catalyzing these processes (translation, transcription, etc. ) but lack the ability to store genetic information: it is therefore unlikely that dna or proteins were the predecessors of life. Rna seems to be the medium which, as we have seen in some of our examples, are able to store genetic information (rna viruses) and transmit copies to daughter cells (self-replication)
