December 18, 2020 Science Journal Essence

December 24, 2020 // --- This week, a new issue of Science (December 18, 2020) was published. Let the little editor come with us.
images from the Journal of Science.
1.Science: New study assembles improved rhesus monkey reference genome doi:10.1126/science.abc6617 In a new study, a large research team from the United States, Italy and Germany has improved the assembly of rhesus monkey reference genome.
study was published in the December 18, 2020 issue of the journal Science under the title "Sequence diversity analyses of an improved rhesus macaque genome enhance its biomedical utility."
paper, they describe the use of advanced sequencing techniques to build the rhesus monkey reference genome and why they think the new reference genome will be so important to medical scientists.
as these researchers point out, rhesus monkeys are the most commonly studied animal models in medical science because their biological characteristics overlap with those of humans.
, for example, through studies of rhesus monkeys, people have a better understanding of HIV and how to treat people infected with HIV.
has also played a significant role in work related to the Ebola vaccine and in the development of treatments for neurological diseases.
also noted that such studies have relied on rhesus monkey genome data since 2007.
they further point out that the technology used to sequence the genome has improved significantly over the past decade, so the time seems ripe to improve the reference genomes of rhesus monkeys.
study involved using the latest tools in the field to improve proximity -- a 120-fold increase in the study.
researchers also annotated the genome using 6.5 million full-length transcripts.
addition, they sequenced the tissue samples of 853 experimental rhesus monkeys and found about 10.5 million inserted or missing variants -- and nearly 86 million single nucleotide variants.
believe that such variants, especially those caused by injury, could be used by medical experts to better understand the nature of human autism and other neurologically based developmental diseases.
also filled about 99.7 percent of the gaps in previous genome sequences.
2.ScienceDaily: Heavy! Revealing the microRNA degradation mechanism doi: 10.1126/science.abc9359 MicroRNA (microRNA, miRNA) is a short RNA sequence that strictly controls which genes are expressed and when they are expressed.
they do this by regulating which messenger RNA (mRNA) transcripts --- a single-stranded template of the protein --- actually read by the cell.
, what controls these cell regulators? In a new study, researchers from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Weill Cornell School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Institute of Medicine found that mRNA and other RNAs often act in reverse on their miRNA regulatory factors, confirming that the path of miRNA degradation is not what scientists expect.
results were published online November 12, 2020 in the journal Science under the title "The ZSWIM8 ubiquitin ligase mediates target-directed microRNA microRNA maldiv".
, author of the paper, is Dr. David Bartel of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
miRNA usually controls gene expression by binding to mRNA transcripts and then works with a protein called Argonaute, silences them so that they degrade more quickly.
given that miRNAs are securely secured inside the Argonaute protein, they are shielded from the destructive enzymes in the cells, they are quite long-lived by cell standards.
they can persist for up to a week, causing damage to many mRNA molecules.
, however, miRNA sometimes binds to a particular target site on the mRNA transcript, causing miRNA to be destroyed prematurely.
this phenomenon, known as target-directed microRNA degradation, TDMD, occurs naturally in cells and is a way to control how much certain miRNAs are allowed to persist at any given time.
found in Bartel's lab that an RNA called CIARANO does not encode any proteins that can lead to the degradation of a specific miRNA called miR-7.
, the researchers began studying this form of degradation.
this interaction is interesting to them because it seems to be inconsistent with current theories about TDMD.
to further explore the mechanisms of TDMD, the researchers focused on this interaction between CIANO non-coding RNA and miR-7.
Shi designed CRISPR screening to determine the genes that are critical to the degradation of this miRNA when it encounters the CYRANO transcript.
this CRISPR screening identified a gene that is critical to the degradation of this miRNA, ZSWIM8.
when they studied the function of the gene, they found that it encoded a part of ubiquitin ligase.
is named because it is found in almost all types of cells.
the protein with ubibin so that the latter is degraded in a cell waste disposal system called proteasome.
the authors used SpikeS2P, a mutant form of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein, as an antigen.
SpikeS2P lacks one of the two protein cutting bits between the S1 and S2 domains, and introduces two mutations and a trimerization domain to stabilize the pre-fusion composition of the S protein.
they labeled Spikes2P with biotin or fluorescent dyes, and selected yeasts that show nanosomes through multiple rounds of screening ---in first by bead binding and then by fluorescently active cell sorting---
study was recently published in the Journal of Science under the title "An ultrapotent synthetic nanobody neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 by stabilizing inactive Spike".
three rounds of screening are generated