- What are purines, and why did Fischer's work on them turn out to matter for genetics?
RNA Biology
The structure, processing, and regulatory roles of RNA.
- What enzyme did Severo Ochoa isolate that could synthesize RNA outside a living cell, and why did it matter for cracking the genetic code?
- Why were Ochoa's and Kornberg's discoveries described as finding the machinery for both the 'permanent archive' and the 'working transcript' of genetic material?
- How did Nirenberg use synthetic RNA made of a single repeating nucleotide to crack the first genetic codon?
- How did Khorana's synthesis of defined repeating RNA sequences resolve the ambiguous codon assignments?
- What role does transfer RNA play in translating a codon into the correct amino acid, and how did Holley reveal it?
- What modern technologies, from gene therapy to PCR testing, depend on the decoded genetic alphabet?
- What did Klug's method reveal about the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and transfer RNA?
- Why does the shape of transfer RNA matter for how it translates the genetic code?
- What are introns, and why must they be removed from messenger RNA before it can be used?
- What did Cech observe in Tetrahymena thermophila that showed RNA could catalyze reactions without any protein present?
- What did Roberts and Sharp find when they compared adenovirus RNA transcripts to the final RNA reaching the ribosome?
- What are introns and how does the spliceosome remove them from RNA?
- How does alternative splicing let a single gene produce multiple distinct proteins?
- Why did the discovery of split genes overturn the earlier picture drawn from bacterial genetics?
- What did Robert Roeder discover in 1969 about how higher organisms transcribe genes?
- What are the three distinct RNA polymerases, and which class of gene does each transcribe?
- What does RNA polymerase actually do when it transcribes a gene?
- What made the Kornberg father-son Nobel pairing unusual in the prize's history?
- How did double-stranded RNA silence genes in Fire and Mello's C. elegans experiments?
- What natural biological role does RNA interference play in cells beyond the laboratory?
- Why was the eight-year gap between discovery and Nobel unusually fast for the committee?
- What kinds of diseases are now treated using RNAi-based therapies?
- How did Osamu Shimomura originally purify green fluorescent protein from thousands of jellyfish?
- What was Martin Chalfie's key insight for turning GFP into a genetic tag usable in any organism?
- How did Roger Tsien engineer GFP's structure to produce a whole palette of fluorescent colours?
- Why did GFP tagging let biologists watch cellular processes happen live, rather than only in fixed, dead tissue?
- What was lin-4, and how did Ambros and Ruvkun discover it silences a developmental gene in C. elegans?
- How did David Baulcombe find a similar RNA-silencing mechanism operating as a plant antiviral defence?
- Roughly how much of the human genome do microRNAs regulate, based on research following this discovery?
- What does the ribosome actually do inside a living cell?
- Why can antibiotics disrupt bacterial protein synthesis without harming human cells?
- What modification did Karikó and Weissman make in 2005 to make mRNA usable as medicine?
- What was the effect of substituting pseudouridine for uridine in synthetic mRNA?
- What is lin-4, and how did Victor Ambros discover it was controlling the timing of worm development?
- How does a microRNA silence a messenger RNA without encoding a protein of its own?
- How widespread are microRNAs across multicellular life, and what diseases have they been implicated in?