November 03, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
The Three Papers of Francisco Mojica
There was a reason for my devoting bedtime
stories of the last few nights to publication of a scientific paper.
In the coming nights as we enter the world
of microbiology and genetics and more specifically CRISPR/Cas system, we will wade
through many scientific papers most of them not even remotely glamorous as the
four papers of Annus mirabilis.
Yet papers need not necessarily be that
sensational to have an impact on revelation of scientific truths, the only
truth that is meaningful and which we apes can rely upon.
So let us see the papers that Francisco Mojica
published.
The first paper that was published in 1993
by Mojica and his team was “Transcription at different salinities of Haloferax
mediterranei sequences adjacent to partially modified Pstl sites” in Molecular
Biology.
In this paper Mojica reported that the DNA
fragment that he had investigated under the guidance of his advisor had an
extremely curious nature – it was characterized with multiple copies of a
near-perfect, roughly palindromic, repeated sequence of 30 bases, separated by
spacers of roughly 36 bases.
This was very unique and a pattern that was
unheard in microbial genomes.
Mojica then was just 28 and was totally
enthralled by these strange new repeating patterns occurring within DNA of some
species of Archaea and decided to devote his life investigating it.
This man is a true scientist.
The second paper was published in 1995 in
the same journal and was titled, “Long stretches of short tandem repeat are
present in the largest replicons of the Archaea Haloferax mediterranei and
Haloferax volcanii and could be involved in replicon partitioning.”
The title itself is complicated and needs
some explanation.
If you note the title of his second paper,
it has two components; the first is the mention of short tandem repeats and
second is the tentative conclusion that they could be involved in replicon
partitioning.
What Mojica was suggesting was that these
clustered repeats had a role in correctly segregating replicated DNA into
daughter cells during cell division.
Replicon is a genetic term that denotes
that region of either DNA or RNA that replicates from a single origin.
As it turned out later this conclusion
proved to be wrong.
Note mon ami that so far the term CRISPR
has never been used in any publication.
It was only in 2001 that he and his co
researcher Ruud Jansen proposed this specific term CRISPR – Clustered Regularly
Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats – for this clustered repeat that has now
been found in twenty more species of microbes.
Now that there was a name, it became an
area of interest for many groups of researchers all over the world.
We shall continue with this story of these mysterious
short tandem repeats in the nights to come.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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