The ownership question of plant gene and genome intellectual properties

The restructuring of the crop agriculture industry over the past two decades has enabled patent holders to exclude, prevent and deter others from using certain research tools and delay or block further follow-on invention

m1A and m1G disrupt A-RNA structure through the intrinsic instability of Hoogsteen base pairs

The B-DNA double helix can dynamically accommodate G–C and A–T base pairs in either Watson-Crick or Hoogsteen configurations. Here, we show that G–C(+) and A–U Hoogsteen base pairs are strongly disfavored in A-RNA. As a result, N(1)-methyl adenosine and N(1)-methyl guanosine, which occur in DNA as a form of alkylation damage, and in RNA as a posttranscriptional modification, have dramatically different consequences. They create G–C(+) and A–U Hoogsteen base pairs in duplex DNA that maintain the structural integrity of the double helix, but block base pairing all together and induce local duplex melting in RNA, providing a mechanism for potently disrupting RNA structure through posttranscriptional modifications. The markedly different propensities to form Hoogsteen base pairs in B-DNA and A-RNA may help meet the opposing requirements of maintaining genome stability on one hand, and dynamically modulating the structure of the epitranscriptome on the other

Systems Biology approach to metabolomics in cancer studies

The astonishing development of high-throughput techniques in the last decades has fostered a renewed, dynamical comprehension of cell and tissue metabolism, giving unexpected insights into the ‘systemic aspects’ of cancer, namely pointing out that metabolism should be considered a truly “systems property. Both internal and microenvironmental cues tightly cooperate in shaping tissue metabolomic fingerprint. tumour metabolome hardly could be mechanistically linked to the linear dynamics of few gene regulatory networks; otherwise it is likely to be the complex end point of several interacting non-linear pathways, involving both cells and their microenvironment. As such, tumour metabolism might be considered an emerging, “systems property”, arising at the integrated scale of the whole system and behaving like an “attractor” in a specific space phase defined by thermodynamic constraints . Therefore, metabolomics ‘strategies’ are settled in order to understand complex biological systems from an integrated (‘holistic’) point of view. Metabolomics measurements are hence correlated with the time-dependent changes in concentrations of other components (proteins, gene-expression data), in order to obtain an integrated model of the gene-protein-metabolite interactions. Such framework represents a meaningful discontinuity with respect to the reductionist and qualitative molecular biology, and discloses new perspective to scientific researc