There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
Just when you thought we’d figured out what genomes could do, the virusoid of rice yellow mottle virus performs a feat of dense coding I’d have thought impossible. The following work requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of molecular biology which the articles in “Molecular Biology Survival Guide for Chemists” might provide the background. Give it a shot. This is fascinating stuff. If the following seems incomprehensible, start with –https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/molecular-biology-survival-guide-for-chemists-i-dna-and-protein-coding-gene-structure/ and then follow the links forward.
Virusoids are single stranded circular RNAs which are dependent on a virus for replication. They are distinct from viroids because viroids need nothing else to replicate. Neither the virusoid or the viroid were thought to code for protein (until now). They are usually found inside the protein shells of plant viruses.
[ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 111 pp. 14542 – 14547 ’14 ] Viroids and virusoids (viroid like satellite RNAs) are small (220 – 450 nucleotide) covalently closed circular RNAs. They are the smallest known replicating circular RNA pathogens. They replicate via a rolling circle mechanism to produce larger concatemers which are then processed into monomeric forms by a self-splicing hammerhead ribozyme, or by cellular enzymes.
The rice yellow mottle virus (RYMV) contains a virusoid which is a covalently closed circular RNA of a mere 220 nucleotides. A 16 kiloDalton basic protein is made from it. How can this be? Figure the average molecular mass of an amino acid at 100 Daltons, and 3 codons per amino acid. This means that 220 can code for 73 amino acids at most (e.g. for a 7 – 8 kiloDalton protein).
So far the RYMV virusoid is the only RNA of viroids and virusoids which actually codes for a protein. The virusoid sequence contains an internal ribosome entry site (IRES) of the following form UGAUGA. Intiation starts at the AUG, and since 220 isn’t an integral multiple of 3 (the size of amino acid codons), it continues replicating in another reading frame until it gets to one of the UGAs (termination codons) in UGAUGA or UGAUGA. Termination codons can be ignored (leaky codons) to obtain larger read through proteins. So this virusoid is a circular RNA with no NONcoding sequences which codes for a protein in either 2 or 3 of the 3 possible reading frames. Notice that UGAUGA contains UGA in both of the alternate reading frames ! So it is likely that the same nucleotide is being read 2 or 3 ways. Amazing ! ! !
It isn’t clear what function the virusoid protein performs for the virus when the virus has infected a cell. Perhaps there aren’t any, and the only function of the protein is to help the virusoid continue existence inside the virus.
Talk about information density. The RYMV virusoid is the Bach Fugue of the genome. Bach sometimes inverts the fugue theme, and sometimes plays it backwards (a musical palindrome if you will).
It is unfortunate that more people don’t understand the details of molecular biology so they can appreciate mechanisms of this elegance. Whether you think understanding it is an esthetic experience, is up to you. I do. To me, this resembles the esthetic experience that mathematics offers.
A while back I wrote a post, wondering if the USA was acquiring brains from the MidEast upheavals, the way we did from Europe because of WWII. Here’s the link https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/maryam-mirzakhani/.
Clearly Canada has done just that. Here are the authors of the PNAS paper above and their affiliations. Way to go Canada !
Mounir Georges AbouHaidar
aDepartment of Cell and Systems Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3B2; and
Srividhya Venkataraman
aDepartment of Cell and Systems Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3B2; and
Ashkan Golshani
bBiology Department, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6
Bolin Liu
aDepartment of Cell and Systems Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3B2; and
Tauqeer Ahmad
aDepartment of Cell and Systems Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3B2; and
Chemiotics II 