Rumor has it that RNA has fallen out of favor politically, presumably as a key molecule for vaccines against Covid, making it an unwelcome symbol to the U.S. administration in the era of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump. According to reports, U.S. researchers have been advised to specifically remove references to messenger RNA from research projects competing for public funding.
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Have you read Jennifer Doudna’s article in Wired? She discusses how the combination of CRISPR and artificial intelligence could be transformational. In her lab, researchers recently used AI tools to help find “small gene-editing proteins that had been sitting undiscovered in public genome databases because we simply didn’t have the ability to crunch all of the data that we’ve collected”.
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MicroRNAs won Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Thomas Cech (Nobel Laureate for the discovery of catalytic RNA) has found a fun way to explain how they work. His book, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, is a mine of insights and information. Here is a small excerpt.
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RNA interference, mRNA vaccines, RNA-guided editing. These are just some of the fields of biomedical research that have exploded in recent years and brought RNA out of the projected shadow of the most famous nucleic acid: DNA. Credit for the ongoing scientific and technological revolution goes to researchers such as Thomas Cech, who have been able to look beyond the double helix and, in many cases, have earned Nobel prizes (the latest being Katalin Karikό for the anti-Covid vaccine). But we also owe a nice gratitude to the strange critters who first exhibited some unexpected phenomena that later became of universal interest.
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CRISPeR FRENZY 