Need Your Help!

[BMEMajor]

Hi everyone,

I am currently taking my first university-level class in molecular biology. The focus of the class is largely DNA and RNA (replication, repair, recombination, expression, etc.) To get that "A," I need to write a paper refuting a claim offered in our text. We are using "Essential Cell Biology" 2nd Edition published by Garland Science in 2004. Anyone have any good ideas I can use for my paper? I preferably need recent research (2005 to present) that refutes some sort of once-fundamental belief involving DNA. Any insight is greatly appreciated.

-Tyler

[mith]

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en … tnG=Search

What other search terms might be useful?
Hint: paradigm

[MrMistery]

do you get to pick what to refute? I’m guessing the central dogma would be an obvious choice, or the "enzymes are proteins" belief

[Cat]

Look up this article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_o … 16f998f3cb

It is hard to give you ideas without knowing what is said in your book. However, I can try to give you a hint: look for phrases that imply solid facts like "ALL enzymes are proteins" and check current information on them.

[mith]

there’s another one, all genes code for proteins.

[BMEMajor]

Thank you for your help so far,

Yes, I can pick anything to refute though the focus of the course is dna replication, dna recombination, rna transcription, and rna translation.

As for the last post, what other things do genes code for besides proteins? I found a study such as

http://www.scienceblog.com/community/ol … 36120.html

that states that a particular pseudodgene stabilizes a similar protein-coding gene. I can’t seem to find anything about actually coding for other polymers or anything like that.

As for MrMistery’s post: I understand that the central dogma of the linear theory of DNA to RNA to protein is under attack, but is there any specific evidence of such a "fluid genome?"

[MrMistery]

think reverstranscriptase. think RNA-dependent RNA polymerase.

As for refuting "all genes call proteins": some genes code for rRNAs that are not translated into proteins: rRNA, tRNA, snRNA, snoRNA, miRNA, siRNA SRP-RNA etc. Also introns named Alu elements are transcribed into RNA but the RNA does not exactly do anything(or at least their role is not known) so their are referred to as non-coding.

And take note, pseudogenes are not genes.

[Author]

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