November 09, 2017 Thursday
Bedtime Story
The Unwinding Enzyme
It is the phosphodiester bond that is the
target of nucleases group of enzymes.
Nucleases are molecular surgeons that initiate
surgical repair of DNA and RNA.
They surgically break open the backbone of
DNA and RNA following which repair operations can be done upon these undone
strands by other molecular machinery of life.
May be in future if I live long enough I
may devote some nights into the story of the discovery of these nucleases.
Helicases were discovered almost a decade
later than the nucleases somewhere around 1976 in E. coli and were described as
“DNA unwinding enzyme” that is “found to denature DNA duplexes in an ATP-dependent
reaction, without detectably degrading”.
The paper that first described this group
of enzymes was titled: “Enzymic unwinding of DNA: 2 chain separation by an
ATP-dependent DNA unwinding enzyme.”
The journal was European Journal of
Biochemistry June 1976 issue and the authors were Abdel-Monem N, Dürwald H and
Hoffmanm-Berling H.
Now the very fact that these names are
totally alien to you and I am positively sure to even their own countrymen
shows how forgettable we all are almost soon after our demise.
Though the difference between these men and
most other human apes is that these men in their fleeting existence went on to
reveal one of the fundamental truths of machinery of life.
So helicases unwind and unpackage our (by
our, I mean and include not just human apes but all our cousins and even the
remotest of our cousins that include plant, algae, bacteria and Archaea) genes.
Most of us have an extremely limited
understanding of the word cousin which actually is a pure biological
terminology.
When we say “cousin”, in most cases the
implication is that of the “first cousin”.
But how do you define a “first cousin”?
In biology, first cousins are any two
living individuals whose most recent common ancestor is a grandparent.
So this means that the first cousins are
two generations away from their most recent common ancestor or MRCA.
MRCA is another interesting terminology
both in biology and genealogy (study of family history).
Every two living organisms on this planet
will have a MRCA and that holds true as much for a human ape as it would hold
for a chimpanzee or a colony of bacteria.
MRCA of any two living organisms or any
group of living organisms is the most recent individual from which all
organisms in a group are directly descended.
As you will rightly understand, it is
almost impossible to identify the exact MRCA of a large group of individuals
say even a group of children in just one classroom.
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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