This is some really cool stuff on a scientific level - RNA binding proteins are just really fascinating and throwing in some post transcriptional splicing and,

This is some really cool stuff on a scientific level - RNA binding proteins are just really fascinating and throwing in some post transcriptional splicing and, wow. That's some really fun stuff! One awesome thing about the state of biology now is that basic research like this that might have once been dismissed as "useless" is now definitively not useless. It's always been true that knowing more about the world is going to help you when you try and shape it to your own benefit, but the line from "hey lets explore this random pathway in this plant" to "hey, let's apply this new on-off switch as a part of this useful synthetic gene circuit to improve crops or engineer plants for bio-remediation or whatever" is short enough that it's hopefully becoming easier to get funding for this sort of stuff. Before, the scientists that discovered enzymes that revolutionized PCR (an important biological tool that is the core technology used to diagnose COVID-19) in thermophilic bacteria at Yellowstone could barely get interest in their work. IIRC the scientists basically used their downtime on vacation to collect samples and do their work since they couldn't make it out to Yellowstone otherwise. Now, agencies everywhere are tripping over themselves to figure out how weird organisms work since something like "this bacteria is capable of eating literal electricity from electrodes to fix carbon" or "this weird on-off switch exists" has direct and powerful applications in synthetic biology, biofuels, etc.