scholarly journals Special Issue: A, B and Z: The Structure, Function and Genetics of Z-DNA and Z-RNA

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (14) ◽  
pp. 7686
Author(s):  
Alan Herbert ◽  
Sergey Karapetyan ◽  
Maria Poptsova ◽  
Karen M. Vasquez ◽  
Quentin Vicens ◽  
...  

It is now difficult to believe that a biological function for the left-handed Z-DNA and Z-RNA conformations was once controversial. The papers in this Special Issue, “Z-DNA and Z-RNA: from Physical Structure to Biological Function”, are based on presentations at the ABZ2021 meeting that was held virtually on 19 May 2021 and provide evidence for several biological functions of these structures. The first of its kind, this international conference gathered over 200 scientists from many disciplines to specifically address progress in research involving Z-DNA and Z-RNA. These high-energy left-handed conformers of B-DNA and A-RNA are associated with biological functions and disease outcomes, as evidenced from both mouse and human genetic studies. These alternative structures, referred to as “flipons”, form under physiological conditions, regulate type I interferon responses and induce necroptosis during viral infection. They can also stimulate genetic instability, resulting in adaptive evolution and diseases such as cancer. The meeting featured cutting-edge science that was, for the most part, unpublished. We plan for the ABZ meeting to reconvene in 2022.

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (31) ◽  
pp. 1550160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernesto A. Matute

Recently we proposed a model for light Dirac neutrinos in which two right-handed (RH) neutrinos per generation are added to the particles of the Standard Model (SM), implemented with the symmetry of fermionic contents. The ordinary one is decoupled via the high scale type-I seesaw mechanism, while the extra pairs off with its left-handed (LH) partner. The symmetry of lepton and quark contents was merely used as a guideline to the choice of parameters because it is not a proper symmetry. Here we argue that the underlying symmetry to take for this correspondence is presymmetry, the hidden electroweak symmetry of the SM extended with RH neutrinos defined by transformations which exchange lepton and quark bare states with the same electroweak charges and no Majorana mass terms in the underlying Lagrangian. It gives a topological character to fractional charges, relates the number of families to the number of quark colors, and now guarantees the great disparity between the couplings of the two RH neutrinos. Thus, Dirac neutrinos with extremely small masses appear as natural predictions of presymmetry, satisfying the ’t Hooft’s naturalness conditions in the extended seesaw where the extra RH neutrinos serve to adulterate the mass properties in the low scale effective theory, which retains without extensions the gauge and Higgs sectors of the SM. However, the high energy threshold for the seesaw implies new physics to stabilize the quantum corrections to the Higgs boson mass in agreement with the naturalness requirement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Batten ◽  
Mark W. Robinson ◽  
Arthur White ◽  
Cathal Walsh ◽  
Barbara Fazekas ◽  
...  

AbstractType I interferon (IFN) dysregulation is a major contributory factor in the development of several autoimmune diseases, termed type I interferonopathies, and is thought to be the pathogenic link with chronic inflammation in these conditions. Anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-Associated Vasculitis (AAV) is an autoimmune disease characterised by necrotising inflammation of small blood vessels. The underlying biology of AAV is not well understood, however several studies have noted abnormalities in type I IFN responses. We hypothesised that type I IFN responses are systemically dysregulated in AAV, consistent with features of a type I interferonopathy. To investigate this, we measured the expression of seven interferon regulated genes (IRGs) (ISG15, SIGLEC1, STAT1, RSAD2, IFI27, IFI44L and IFIT1) in peripheral blood samples, as well as three type I IFN regulated proteins (CXCL10, MCP-1 and CCL19) in serum samples from AAV patients, healthy controls and disease controls. We found no difference in type I IFN regulated gene or protein expression between AAV patients and healthy controls. Furthermore, IRG and IFN regulated protein expression did not correlate with clinical measurements of disease activity in AAV patients. Thus, we conclude that systemic type I IFN responses are not key drivers of AAV pathogenesis and AAV should not be considered a type I interferonopathy.


1981 ◽  
Vol 1 (10) ◽  
pp. 801-810 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl A. Piez ◽  
Benes L. Trus

A specific fibril model is presented consisting of bundles of five-stranded microfibrils, which are usually disordered (except axially) but under lateral compression become ordered. The features are as follows (where D = 234 residues or 67 nm): (1) D-staggered collagen molecules 4.5 D long in the helical microfibril have a left-handed supercoil with a pitch of 400–700 residues, but microfibrils need not have helical symmetry. (2) Straight-tilted 0.5-D overlap regions on a near-hexagonal lattice contribute the discrete x-ray diffraction reflections arising from lateral order, while the gap regions remain disordered. (3) The overlap regions are equivalent, but are crystallographically distinguished by systematic displacements from the near-hexagonal lattice. (4) The unit cell is the same as in a recently proposed three-dimensional crystal model, and calculated intensities in the equatorial region of the x-ray diffraction pattern agree with observed values.


2003 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.E Gagna ◽  
W.C Lambert
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3594
Author(s):  
Tamaki Endoh ◽  
Eriks Rozners ◽  
Takashi Ohtsuki

Nucleic acids not only store genetic information in their primary sequence but also exhibit biological functions through the formation of their unique structures [...]


1989 ◽  
Vol 264 (14) ◽  
pp. 7921-7935
Author(s):  
R V Gessner ◽  
C A Frederick ◽  
G J Quigley ◽  
A Rich ◽  
A H J Wang

2016 ◽  
Vol 136 (9) ◽  
pp. S234
Author(s):  
M. Sarkar ◽  
L.C. Tsoi ◽  
X. Xing ◽  
L. Yun ◽  
P. Harms ◽  
...  

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