November 24, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
The Third Paper had a Russian Connection
What really fascinated the Vergnaud team
was that many of these news spacers corresponded to prophage genome present in
Y. pestis genome recovered during Vietnam War.
I will quote just two or three important
lines from the abstract of this paper:
“Interestingly, the most recently acquired
spacers were found to have homologue at another locus in the genome, the
majority of these inside an inactive prophage.
This is believed to be the first time that
the origin of spacers in CRISPR elements has been explained.
CRISPRs may represent a memory of ‘past
genetic aggressions’ ”
The authors here too implicate the genetic
material in the CRISPR spaces to originate from phages though they were wrong
in claiming that they were the first one to come up with this explanation.
They probably were not aware of the recent
paper that came from Mojica lab.
That paper, in fact, had preceded them by
just month and hence they can be forgiven for after all, they could not have
been aware of the on goings of the Mojica lab at the time of the writing of
their own paper.
Just like Mojica, Vergnaud found almost no
journal ready to accept his paper.
Before the paper was finally accepted and
got published in the journal Microbiology in March 2005, it was rejected by
four journals namely Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal
of Bacteriology, Nucleic Acids Research and Genome Research.
Now let us look at the last paper that made
the similar claim as made by these two papers.
The third and the last paper came out in
the month of August of the same year whose authors were Bolotin A, Quinquis B,
Sorokin A and Ehrlich SD from INRA research center at Juoy-en-Josas.
Alexander Bolotin was a Russian expatriate who
was working as a microbiologist at the French National Institute for
Agricultural Research.
After the dissolution of Soviet Union on
December 26, 1991 in my presence pure scientific research took an
insurmountable beating.
All of a sudden there was no need for
scientists and doctors and scholars in the land that had newly acquired
capitalism and freedom.
Everybody wanted or was forced to trade.
In a nation where students earlier wished
to be astronauts in the line of Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova now
overnight desired to be businessmen only to be sucked in a vortex of greed,
depravity and loss of sensitivity towards fellow human apes.
It was not surprising to see medical
students and even doctors going to market to stand in the freezing snow and
sell ice-creams in boxes or fur coats and boots.
Of course, many would raise the question, “What
is wrong in that?”
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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