https://evolutionnews.org/2019/08/the-genius-of-alternative-reading-frames/
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Only a design genius could do it.
Oh okay then, well I’m convinced.
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The irony here is the dissonance between:
If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.
and
Only a design genius could do it.
So, it does not look like a human design (agreed!), so therefore it is designed by a genius (huh?).
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Ann Gauger wrote:
“So for example, if you get a gene for blue eyes from your mom and a gene for brown eyes from your dad, are they both expressed? The answer is most probably yes.”
In most cases, the answer is most definitely no.
Most alleles (versions of genes) for blue eyes are recessive null (inactive) alleles. If they are deletion alleles, they are obviously not expressed. If they are nonsense (premature stop codon) alleles, their mRNA transcripts are preferentially degraded.
The latter mechanism is called “nonsense-mediated decay,” and it was discovered in 1979 in both yeast and humans. It even has a Wikipedia page. It’s hard to imagine that @Agauger would not have been exposed to something that basic.
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Dammit I’m mad
Evil is a deed as I live.
God, am I reviled?
I rise, my bed on a sun, I melt.
To be not one man emanating is sad. I piss.
Alas it is so late. Who stops to help? Man, it is hot.
I’m in it.
I tell.
I am not a devil.
I level “Mad Dog”.
Ah, say burning is as a deified gulp
in my halo of a mired rum tin.
I erase many men. Oh, to be man, a sin.
Is evil in a clam? In a trap?
No. It is open.
On it I was stuck.
Rats peed on hope.
Elsewhere dips a web.
Be still if I fill its ebb.
Ew, a spider … eh?
We sleep.
Oh no!
Deep, stark cuts saw it in one position.
Part animal, can I live? Sin is a name.
Both, one … my names are in it. Murder?
I’m a fool. A hymn I plug,
Deified as a sign in ruby ash - a Goddam level I lived at.
On mail let it in. I’m it.
Oh, sit in ample hot spots.
Oh, wet!
A loss it is alas (sip). I’d assign it a name.
Name not one bottle minus an ode by me:
“Sir, I deliver. I’m a dog.”
Evil is a deed as I live.
Dammit I’m mad.
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At the end of the article Dr. Gauger says:
Only a design genius could do it.
So I guess this is another situation where Evolution News & Views is really about promoting Divine Design, the ultimate in Intelligent Design.
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She does! He asks if overprinting ever happens. It does.
He comments that this would be miraculous. In fact, if the ID understanding of proteins were correct, this should be impossible. It is precisely the observation that Axe’s theory of proteins would entail should never be possible.
@Agauger doesn’t have an answer for this, of course. Which might be we have the non-sequitor: “doesn’t look designed, ergo genius design.”
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I don’t think that is really what Charles was describing. He was describing convergent (or maybe also divergent) transcription such that both strands are coding. That is different from over-printing and what @Agauger went on so wistfully about.
That isn’t overprinting?
Not the way I think about it. To me, overprinting is the use of multiple reading frames on the same strand.
But this may be nothing but pedantry and semantics. Regardless, what @Agauger drew was not the same scenario that Charles described.
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You will have to define your terms and explain some more. I’m using the terms as explained in Wikipedia: Overlapping gene - Wikipedia. To be clear, that just matches my understanding, which was formed a long time ago by other means.
What definitions are you using?
From the Wiki page:
Overprinting refers to a type of overlap in which all or part of the sequence of one gene is read in an alternate reading frame from another gene at the same locus.
That seems to me to apply to overlapping genes on the same strand, and not convergently-transcribed genes (whose ORFs may well overlap).
My bias towards thinking in RNA terms is probably a source of the confusion. What Charles described was, to me, a potential source of antisense RNAs, small RNAs, etc. While I cannot explain it other than say its an RNA thing, this is the main reason I compartmentalize these two cases.
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Overprinting applies to the antisense too. Regardless Gauger doesn’t use that term. She seems to describe his scenario, I think.
She definitely does not. Her pictures are the case where two reading frames are read from the same mRNA.
Incidentally, the situation @Agauger describes is seen in many RNA viruses.
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Oh I see. You are right @art. Antisense coding certainly does happen, but the example she chose is not antisense coding. The two genes are read in the same direction. @Agauger picked an example that has a different scenario than she was asked about, though she is correct in confirmg antisense coding is real.
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It’s not a big deal. Just like my reaction vis-a-vis antisense RNAs, @Agauger’s response just shows what she likely thinks more about (maybe she is a virologist at heart).
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Antisense coding is common in DNA viruses too!
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