
One Gene, Many Proteins: Flexibility Found in Life’s Blueprints - nature24
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160426-one-gene-many-proteins/
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maxander
Commenters posting about how obvious this result should be- since _we know_
living systems are a huge mess of hacks where anything could happen- have a
point, but perversely, this kind of point may be harder for trained biologists
to swallow than ordinary readers. In trying to make sense of deeply
complicated systems, using extremely limited experimental data, "educated
guesses" such as "a given gene has some specific function" are a tremendous
aid in generating useful conclusions. The scientists who use these heuristics
are smart people who know what they're doing- they know that their assumption
will be faulty in some cases, but even if their conclusions are _usually_
true, these studies are of great use. What a result like the one in this
article tells us is that this particular assumption wasn't only sometimes
faulty, it was _counter-intuitively_ faulty. As background context for future
studies, alone, this sort of information is invaluable.

One might argue that we should try to excise assumptions like these from
biology altogether, since we've seen them so often be wrong. But we're dealing
with the messy physical world here- making conclusions about the world based
on limited empirical data cannot be done without taking some underlying rules
for granted. For instance, note that this study also makes assumptions-
namely, that the _in vitro_ behavior of these protein isoforms they produce
are indicative of _in vivo_. There are good reasons to suspect that this
wouldn't be the case! But our methods are still so limited that we believe
we're better off taking this assumption-laden evidence on face value.

~~~
x5n1
"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising
than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not
only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

J. B. S. Haldane, British geneticist and evolutionary biologist.

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jrapdx3
While it's not new that genes can be associated with different products in
distinct (and not directly related) body systems, the research begins to put
this into context more generally.

The part that's always fascinated me is the potential massive permutation of
protein interactions. For example, the proteins are commonly enzymes or
components of cell membrane receptors. Variations in these kinds of proteins
affect how other proteins can do their jobs, so multiplied over and over, the
end results become wildly unpredictable.

In science the pace never stops, it just gets more and more interesting...

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jcbeard
It's been known for many years that one gene, once edited, can produce many
different variations of the same protein. Cool info piece though if not
familiar with genetics.

~~~
astazangasta
This is a slightly different result, actually - they're suggesting that these
different variants are actually proteins of unrelated function. I'm not sure I
buy this off a vast interaction study, which is a pretty artificial and noisy
way to scan protein function, but it's a novel claim.

~~~
timr
_" they're suggesting that these different variants are actually proteins of
unrelated function....it's a novel claim."_

Actually, that's old news, too. The only thing new here is that they're
talking about a paper that did a large-scale analysis of the phenomenon. From
the paper's [1] abstract:

 _" While alternative splicing is known to diversify the functional
characteristics of some genes, the extent to which protein isoforms globally
contribute to functional complexity on a proteomic scale remains unknown. To
address this systematically, we..."_

That said, I look forward to the day when the mass-media discovers
glycosylation and other forms of post-translational modification, and writes
the _next_ article in this series on How Scientists Had It Wrong All Along
(tm).

[1]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416300435)

~~~
dkural
It's not the mass media only, it's also the PR offices of these institutes,
and the scientists that go along with it. The reason these institutes value
overblown media coverage is, well, it's needed and often enough to convince
their hedge-fund retired billionaire donors that Amazing Things are happening
there.

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taneq
Pretty much every other aspect of life performs a bunch of complex,
interdependent functions. It's hardly surprising that genes do so too.

