WASHINGTON — Squid don’t have thermostats to manage ocean temperatures. Instead, the cephalopods tweak RNA to regulate to frigid waters, a examine suggests.
Usually, genetic directions encoded in DNA are faithfully copied into messenger RNA, or mRNA, after which into proteins. But squid and different soft-bodied cephalopods edit lots of their mRNAs in order that the ensuing proteins comprise some totally different constructing blocks than are inscribed in DNA (SN: 3/25/20; SN: 4/6/17).
“In these animals, 60 percent or more of their proteins are actually recoded. This is astonishing in comparison to how [rarely RNA] editing is used in mammals,” molecular biologist Kavita Rangan mentioned December 5 at Cell Bio 2022, the annual joint assembly of the American Society for Cell Biology and the European Molecular Biology Organization.
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Rangan, of the University of California, San Diego, examined the results that modifying has on proteins known as kinesins. Those molecular motors ferry cargo all through cells alongside protein tracks known as microtubules. Problems on the mobile railway can result in cells’ disfunction or demise and will contribute to illness (SN: 12/12/19).
Squid hatchlings put in chilly 6° Celsius water for a day edited mRNAs for a kinesin protein in another way and extra closely than hatchlings positioned in heat 20° C water, Rangon discovered.
She then made an unedited model and several other edited variations of kinesin within the laboratory and in contrast the proteins’ actions on microtubules. In the chilly, unedited kinesin moved extra slowly, traveled shorter distances and fell off microtubule tracks extra usually than it did when heat.
Two of the edited kinesins, like these made by squid in chilly water, moved a bit slower than the unedited protein. But the renovated variations grabbed on to microtubules extra usually and had longer runs than unedited kinesin. “This suggests that recoding can allow kinesin to stay on its tracks and travel farther” within the chilly, Rangan mentioned.
Changing some made-on-demand RNAs as an alternative of completely altering DNA could give squid extra flexibility to regulate to fluctuating ocean temperatures, she mentioned.