4 ms·

One Gene, Many Proteins: Flexibility Found in Life’s Blueprints

32 points by nature24 11y ago

jcbeard 11y ago
It's been known for many years that one gene, once edited, can produce many different variations of the same protein. Cool info piece though if not familiar with genetics.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  This is a slightly different result, actually - they're suggesting that these different variants are actually proteins of unrelated function. I'm not sure I buy this off a vast interaction study, which is a pretty artificial and noisy way to scan protein function, but it's a novel claim.
  - timr 11y ago
    "they're suggesting that these different variants are actually proteins of unrelated function....it's a novel claim." Actually, that's old news, too. The only thing new here is that they're talking about a paper that did a large-scale analysis of the phenomenon. From the paper's [1] abstract: "While alternative splicing is known to diversify the functional characteristics of some genes, the extent to which protein isoforms globally contribute to functional complexity on a proteomic scale remains unknown. To address this systematically, we..." That said, I look forward to the day when the mass-media discovers glycosylation and other forms of post-translational modification, and writes the next article in this series on How Scientists Had It Wrong All Along (tm). [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416300435 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416...
    - dkural 11y ago
      It's not the mass media only, it's also the PR offices of these institutes, and the scientists that go along with it. The reason these institutes value overblown media coverage is, well, it's needed and often enough to convince their hedge-fund retired billionaire donors that Amazing Things are happening there.
  - dnautics 11y ago
    There's a lot of that that's not novel. Ttr for example is largely a (retinol binding protein)-carrier in the bloodstream, but it's function in the brain is...?? Maybe a protein that flushes small molecules accumulated in the brain? The knockout mouse has an very very subtle behavioral change.
  - Blahah 11y ago
    We've known this result for nearly as long as we've known about alternative splicing too. All it takes is a single exon with some functional motif to allow multiple proteins with different functions from a single gene.
jrapdx3 11y ago
While it's not new that genes can be associated with different products in distinct (and not directly related) body systems, the research begins to put this into context more generally. The part that's always fascinated me is the potential massive permutation of protein interactions. For example, the proteins are commonly enzymes or components of cell membrane receptors. Variations in these kinds of proteins affect how other proteins can do their jobs, so multiplied over and over, the end results become wildly unpredictable. In science the pace never stops, it just gets more and more interesting...
taneq 11y ago
Pretty much every other aspect of life performs a bunch of complex, interdependent functions. It's hardly surprising that genes do so too.
maxander 11y ago
Commenters posting about how obvious this result should be- since we know living systems are a huge mess of hacks where anything could happen- have a point, but perversely, this kind of point may be harder for trained biologists to swallow than ordinary readers. In trying to make sense of deeply complicated systems, using extremely limited experimental data, "educated guesses" such as "a given gene has some specific function" are a tremendous aid in generating useful conclusions. The scientists who use these heuristics are smart people who know what they're doing- they know that their assumption will be faulty in some cases, but even if their conclusions are usually true, these studies are of great use. What a result like the one in this article tells us is that this particular assumption wasn't only sometimes faulty, it was counter-intuitively faulty. As background context for future studies, alone, this sort of information is invaluable. One might argue that we should try to excise assumptions like these from biology altogether, since we've seen them so often be wrong. But we're dealing with the messy physical world here- making conclusions about the world based on limited empirical data cannot be done without taking some underlying rules for granted. For instance, note that this study also makes assumptions- namely, that the in vitro behavior of these protein isoforms they produce are indicative of in vivo. There are good reasons to suspect that this wouldn't be the case! But our methods are still so limited that we believe we're better off taking this assumption-laden evidence on face value.
- x5n1 11y ago
  "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." J. B. S. Haldane, British geneticist and evolutionary biologist.

32 points by nature24 11y ago

It's been known for many years that one gene, once edited, can produce many different variations of the same protein. Cool info piece though if not familiar with genetics.

astazangasta 11y ago
This is a slightly different result, actually - they're suggesting that these different variants are actually proteins of unrelated function. I'm not sure I buy this off a vast interaction study, which is a pretty artificial and noisy way to scan protein function, but it's a novel claim.
- timr 11y ago
  "they're suggesting that these different variants are actually proteins of unrelated function....it's a novel claim." Actually, that's old news, too. The only thing new here is that they're talking about a paper that did a large-scale analysis of the phenomenon. From the paper's [1] abstract: "While alternative splicing is known to diversify the functional characteristics of some genes, the extent to which protein isoforms globally contribute to functional complexity on a proteomic scale remains unknown. To address this systematically, we..." That said, I look forward to the day when the mass-media discovers glycosylation and other forms of post-translational modification, and writes the next article in this series on How Scientists Had It Wrong All Along (tm). [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416300435 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416...
  - dkural 11y ago
    It's not the mass media only, it's also the PR offices of these institutes, and the scientists that go along with it. The reason these institutes value overblown media coverage is, well, it's needed and often enough to convince their hedge-fund retired billionaire donors that Amazing Things are happening there.
- dnautics 11y ago
  There's a lot of that that's not novel. Ttr for example is largely a (retinol binding protein)-carrier in the bloodstream, but it's function in the brain is...?? Maybe a protein that flushes small molecules accumulated in the brain? The knockout mouse has an very very subtle behavioral change.
- Blahah 11y ago
  We've known this result for nearly as long as we've known about alternative splicing too. All it takes is a single exon with some functional motif to allow multiple proteins with different functions from a single gene.

jrapdx3 11y ago

While it's not new that genes can be associated with different products in distinct (and not directly related) body systems, the research begins to put this into context more generally. The part that's always fascinated me is the potential massive permutation of protein interactions. For example, the proteins are commonly enzymes or components of cell membrane receptors. Variations in these kinds of proteins affect how other proteins can do their jobs, so multiplied over and over, the end results become wildly unpredictable. In science the pace never stops, it just gets more and more interesting...

taneq 11y ago

Pretty much every other aspect of life performs a bunch of complex, interdependent functions. It's hardly surprising that genes do so too.

maxander 11y ago

Commenters posting about how obvious this result should be- since we know living systems are a huge mess of hacks where anything could happen- have a point, but perversely, this kind of point may be harder for trained biologists to swallow than ordinary readers. In trying to make sense of deeply complicated systems, using extremely limited experimental data, "educated guesses" such as "a given gene has some specific function" are a tremendous aid in generating useful conclusions. The scientists who use these heuristics are smart people who know what they're doing- they know that their assumption will be faulty in some cases, but even if their conclusions are usually true, these studies are of great use. What a result like the one in this article tells us is that this particular assumption wasn't only sometimes faulty, it was counter-intuitively faulty. As background context for future studies, alone, this sort of information is invaluable. One might argue that we should try to excise assumptions like these from biology altogether, since we've seen them so often be wrong. But we're dealing with the messy physical world here- making conclusions about the world based on limited empirical data cannot be done without taking some underlying rules for granted. For instance, note that this study also makes assumptions- namely, that the in vitro behavior of these protein isoforms they produce are indicative of in vivo. There are good reasons to suspect that this wouldn't be the case! But our methods are still so limited that we believe we're better off taking this assumption-laden evidence on face value.

x5n1 11y ago
"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." J. B. S. Haldane, British geneticist and evolutionary biologist.