Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: RNA

  • Gain of function

    Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States   “It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.” – Enrico Fermi (1901–1954)   SARS-CoV-2 virus anatomy with proteins labeled. Created by Maya Peters Kostman for the Innovative Genomics Institute. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. “Gain of Function” (GoF) burst into…

  • COVID-19: clinico-immunologic snapshot of a coronavirus

    S.E.S. Medina Benbrook, Texas, United States   Coronavirus: Protein Spike Corona. A colorized transmission electron micrograph of the Middle East respiratory syndrome-related Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) that emerged in 2012. November 19, 2012. Public domain image from National Institutes of Health. Source. A tiny mote of moisture, buoyed by silk-soft wind currents, is kicked and coaxed along a random path…

  • Histone acetylation a half century later: the modest birth of epigenetics

    Beatriz GT Pogo   This figure (from Pogo et al 1966) shows the time course experiment comparing incorporation of acetyl groups into histones and uridine into RNA. It can be seen that acetylation took place before RNA synthesis suggesting that changes in the interaction between histones in DNA preceded gene activity. In 1964 I joined…