November 25, 2017 Saturday
Bedtime Story
Alexander Bolotin Makes a Bold Assumption
It is not only hard but nearly impossible
in defining what is wrong when almost hundred percent intellectuals of a
certain society are forced to sell ice creams and leather jackets in the
markets in freezing winter.
It is just that these very same
intellectuals who made a pretty comfortable living at least by the third world
standards suddenly feel as if the ground beneath them has been taken away and
there is no edge to hold on.
It is that nightmarish sensation of free
fall into the darkness with no bottom that the Russians must have felt; or at
least that’s the way I thought about their feelings then.
Anyone who would have lived through those
times would have realized how cruel total capitalism can be.
In those times anyone there who desired to
pursue science and mathematics simply had to leave the country that was
becoming a capitalistic nightmare.
Both corruption and inflation rose not in
percentages but in multiple of times.
Alexander Bolotin happened to one of such Russian
expatriate who had found shelter in the Western nation of France and found
himself a career working as a microbiologist at the French National Institute
for Agricultural Research.
The paper of which he was the first author was
titled, “Clustered regularly interspaced short palindrome repeats (CRISPRs)
have spacers of extrachromosomal origin.”
If you read the abstract of this paper, it
is far more blatant and less shy of proposing the new idea of cellular immunity
being provided by the spacers in the CRISPR elements.
“CRISPR structures are found in the
vicinity of four names named cas1 to cas4.
In silico analysis revealed another cluster
of three genes associated with CRISPR structures associated with CRISPR
structures in many bacterial species, named here as cas1B, cas5 and cas6, and
also revealed a certain number of spacers that have homology with extant genes,
most frequently derived from phages, but also derived from other
extrachromosomal elements.
Sequence analysis of CRISPR structures from
24 strains of Streptococcus thermophilus and Streptococcus vestibularis
confirmed the homology of spacers with extrachromsomal elements.
Phage sensitivity of S. thermophilus
strains appears to be correlated with the number of spacers in the CRISPR locus
the strain carries.
The authors suggest that the spacer
elements are the traces of past invasions by extrachromosomal elements, and
hypothesize that provide the cell immunity against phage infection, and more
generally foreign DNA expression, by coding an anti-sense RNA.”
The last sentence clearly states that the
team was making a hypothesis that the CRISPR-Cas system could be providing cellular
immunity to the bacteria and Archaea microbes again viral attacks.
The speculation about the role of CRISPR in
conferring immunity to the microbes possessing it turned out to be right though
the mechanism proposed turned out to be wrong.
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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