foodchain Posted January 3, 2010 Posted January 3, 2010 I don’t even know if this is possible but could you grow an insect to a certain age and then target and or destroy spliceosome activity without affecting that organism too heavily? I just wonder if spliceosome activity pertains to the phenotype heavily in terms of evolution. As genes may shift in activity via them on an evolutionary scale I guess, its hard to work the idea is all. Basically I wonder if you could stop locus swarms from forming if the spliceosome was involved in that transformation by stopping it at that level. Basically that the locus is a certain phenotype that has enough of a selective advantage to persist, but that selection was sharp enough that such traits exist on the molecular scale via spliceosome activity, and that the spliceosome could reflect evolutionary change in such a manner. I would think this would be an epigenetic effect, though not sure.
dttom Posted January 3, 2010 Posted January 3, 2010 Maybe there could be a gene laid silent during most of the lifetime but could be triggered to express, once expressed it poisons the spliceosome and render it non-functional. Approaches could be attempt like this. But I suspect the experimental organism would be badly affect after such an induced expression, spliceosome modifies hnRNA to give mRNA, by cutting out introns guided by sequence signal before and after intron region, potentially many stop codons or start signals could be included, without cutting out the intron the RNA could even not be exported out of nucleus as it lacks certain signalling molecule attached (EJC if I remember it rightly). Even it makes it way to the cytoplasm, I bet it couldn't be translated into functional protein as usual, hindered by the stop codon and start signal in the introns, matter is further complicated by potential regulatory sequence in intron region, where molecule could bind and affect translation.
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