
Novel 'on-off' switch discovered in plant defenses - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-on-off-defenses.html
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vikramkr
This is some really cool stuff on a scientific level - RNA binding proteins
are just really fascinating and throwing in some post transcriptional splicing
and, wow. That's some really fun stuff!

One awesome thing about the state of biology now is that basic research like
this that might have once been dismissed as "useless" is now definitively not
useless. It's always been true that knowing more about the world is going to
help you when you try and shape it to your own benefit, but the line from "hey
lets explore this random pathway in this plant" to "hey, let's apply this new
on-off switch as a part of this useful synthetic gene circuit to improve crops
or engineer plants for bio-remediation or whatever" is short enough that it's
hopefully becoming easier to get funding for this sort of stuff. Before, the
scientists that discovered enzymes that revolutionized PCR (an important
biological tool that is _the_ core technology used to diagnose COVID-19) in
thermophilic bacteria at Yellowstone could barely get interest in their work.
IIRC the scientists basically used their downtime on vacation to collect
samples and do their work since they couldn't make it out to Yellowstone
otherwise. Now, agencies everywhere are tripping over themselves to figure out
how weird organisms work since something like "this bacteria is capable of
eating literal electricity from electrodes to fix carbon" or "this weird on-
off switch exists" has direct and powerful applications in synthetic biology,
biofuels, etc.

