Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Psalm 139:14 NLT
"Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark have uncovered a new form of gene regulation that appears to be a form of encryption of genetic information. That idea was not lost on them as they pursued the analogy. From “Encrypted messages in biological processes”:
RNA modifications can encrypt the RNA code and are responsible for a very sophisticated control of RNA function. A Danish-German research team has shown that modified RNA bases have a great impact on the dynamics of gene expression from DNA to functional RNA. The study yields important new insight into how the basis of RNA modifications can affect the function of mature RNA molecules.Programmers know all about cryptology, a form of intelligent design. Encryption is necessary when you want to conceal information from people who shouldn’t have access to it.
There are many ways to achieve encryption, such as steganography, frame shifting, compression, and other techniques, but the function is to transfer a message in plain sight such that it can only be decrypted by those with the encryption “key.” Let’s learn how the cell does it.
For the encryption analogy to work, we need to see the algorithm targeting desired recipients and shielding the message from others. That’s evident from their statement that the “m6a” modification is able to “prevent the message of the RNA in being read by the wrong recipients.”RNA is composed of four bases (abbreviated A, U, G and C), thereby disseminating its message with a fairly simple code. In recent years, research has shown an unprecedented impact of RNA modifications at all steps of the maturation process. More than a hundred RNA modifications have been identified with roles in both inhibiting and facilitating binding to proteins, DNA and other RNA molecules. This encryption by RNA modification is a way to prevent the message of the RNA in being read by the wrong recipients.
The research-team has focused on the RNA-modification m6A and shown that RNA can be labeled with this modification while being copied from DNA…. The results demonstrate that an m6A positioned at an exon next to an intron increases the RNA maturation process, while m6A within the introns slows down the maturation of RNA.
We also need to see an encryption key that can scramble the message, and a reader with the key that can unscramble it. Is this a possible role for the mysterious introns? ...explains:
Newly made RNA consists of functional parts (exons) and non-functional parts (introns). Introns are excised in a process called splicing to yield a mature and functional RNA molecule composes [sic] entirely of exons. The RNA modification m6A can increase or inhibit this maturation process dependent of where m6A is deposited on newly made RNA.It has long been a mystery why genes code for stretches called introns that are translated but then cut out afterwards. Why are they there? Here’s where the findings get really interesting. Introns appear to help scramble the message, fulfilling the encryption role, but they do something else: they regulate how the exons will be assembled. The paper in Cell Reports explains how it works:
Here, we provide a time-resolved high-resolution assessment of m6A on nascent RNA transcripts and unveil its importance for the control of RNA splicing kinetics. We find that early co-transcriptional m6A deposition near splice junctions promotes fast splicing, while m6A modifications in introns are associated with long, slowly processed introns and alternative splicing events. In conclusion, we show that early m6A deposition specifies the fate of transcripts regarding splicing kinetics and alternative splicing.We’ve heard about m6a before as a possible player in the “epigenetic code.” As an epigenetic marker, m6a contains its own information (the “key”) that affects the products of translation." EN&V
