RNA

It strikes me that discovery of RNA can be more groundbreaking than that of the famous double-helix DNA. RNA turns out to be more than a humble servant of DNA. And an important molecule it is. A game changer.

As far as scientific recognition is concerned, RNA-related breakthroughs have led to 11 Nobel Prizes since 2000. Do I have to remind you the 2023 Nobel Laureates have been working on the mRNA vaccines that save millions of lives?

But the structure and functions of RNA have proved to be a lot trickier than DNA's. To learn more about RNA, I borrowed The Catalyst written by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Thomas Cech. 

To be frank, it is a book I wish I had read before my biology class. It is extraordinary to see how Thomas Cech explains the complicated subject in an easy-to-understand way. One trick of his is to use figurative language or analogy. To explain the concept of splicing noncoding DNA or introns, Thomas Cech reminds us the repair of a badly frayed rope segment by a sailor. That's how a sailor would cut the rope above and below the frayed segment, throw away the damaged piece, and attach (or splice) the ends of the two good pieces back together.

To give us a better idea of splicing, Thomas Cech invites us to think of an intron as a few meaningless words, a string of "blahs," interrupting an otherwise intelligible sentence: You really smell nice blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah today. Splicing is explained like a word-processing system which can highlight the offending interruption. Press "Delete", and the blahs are spliced out. You really smell nice today.  

What if there is something called alternative splicing? That happens when there are two introns instead of one: You really smell blah-blah nice blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah today. As usual, both introns are spliced out, and then the final version reads: You really smell nice today. But wait, hang on a minute. An unexpected mistake, or so-called alternative splicing, could have come with a hefty price tag. The alternative step could have skipped over nice, resulting in smell being joined to today. That way of splicing would then change the sentence.

You really smell today.