Know thyself
- 1Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas 77555-0144, USA
- 2Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore 169857
- Corresponding author: maragarc{at}utmb.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
The realization that RNA molecules could be enzymes as well as genetic material suggested that RNAs were likely the earliest genomes to evolve on earth. The implications for evolution are many and very interesting, but here I will focus on one that I consider the most interesting: the central role of RNA in the ability of genomes (even latecomer DNA genomes) to encode systems that recognize signatures of foreign genomes and by inference to know themselves.
My personal interest in this area goes back to my PhD studies on the interferon system and in particular the finding that interferons could selectively inhibit the expression of SV40 genes from an incoming virus (or plasmid) but not from integrated copies of the same. In fact, the interferon system could discriminate between endogenous and exogenous genes, even when driven by cellular promoters, (published and unpublished results with Peter Lengyel at Yale University). After …
