Scientists Discover Double Meaning in Genetic Code

[xor]

Science daily reports:

 

Dec. 12, 2013 — Scientists have discovered a second code hiding within DNA. This second code contains information that changes how scientists read the instructions contained in DNA and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease.

 

This sounds interesting already, but how about this:

 

"For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made," said Stamatoyannopoulos. "Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways."

 

The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. The UW team discovered that some codons, which they called duons, can have two meanings, one related to protein sequence, and one related to gene control. These two meanings seem to have evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made.

 

So an even more complex code to be deciphered.

 

Here's the original article(too bad we need access to Science-magazine to read more than the abstract):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6164/1367

 

Thoughts?

Edited December 15, 2013 by xor

[soaring crane]

Yijing

[SonOfTheGods]

As the saying goes: One man's junk, is another man's DNA

[soaring crane]

The subject intrigues me but I have to wait till tomorrow to write more... I know there's a LOT more to dna than our stone age researchers are aware of.

[Nungali]

I am curious about how Mer curious fits in here.

[soaring crane]

I can only write figuratively about my intuition on this but what I intuit is that researchers so far have been able to find 1's and 0's, peaks and valleys, on a big ass hard drive. They've figured out how some rudimentary combinations of on/off equate to some letters and words, but they don't know the programming language nor how to interpret any but the simplest blocks of code. They're completely lost when trying to put a larger context onto what they've discovered so far.

 

For example, I have Starry Night as my wallpaper. Geneticists are looking at a little piece of binary string and telling us that it probably equates to a shade of blue at a particular quadrant in the picture. But they don't know what the picture is. They don't even know if what they're looking at is in fact piece of a painting, or a chord in a song, or a line in a poem.

Edited December 16, 2013 by soaring crane