Genetic code

• This is the fourth Wyss project selected by Northpond Labs for additional funding.
• The Laboratory has previously funded the Wyss’ eRNA (now being commercialized by EnPlusOne Biosciences ), SomaCode , and Lab-on-a-Molecule projects.
• “The AminoX platform has the potential to transform our ability to develop differentiated protein-based therapeutics by significantly expanding the vocabulary of building blocks that can be incorporated into biologics at high throughput.
• We are thrilled that the AminoX team’s journey to the market will be accelerated by this support,” said Angelika Fretzen, Ph.D., M.B.A., the Wyss Institute’s Technology Translation Director & Chief Operating Officer.

• The entire process was controversial and the two us who are on the subcommission (chair Jan Zalasiewicz and vice-chair Martin Head) even refused to cast a vote as we did not want to legitimise it.
• In any case, the proposal ran into opposition from longstanding members.
• Many geologists, used to working with millions of years, find it hard to accept an epoch just seven decades long – that’s just one human lifetime.
• He and his colleagues were perfectly aware that humans had been doing that for millennia.

It makes no sense, Crutzen said, to use the Holocene for present time. He conceived the Anthropocene as the time when human impacts intensified, suddenly, dramatically, enough to push the Earth into a new state. The science journalist Andrew Revkin (who thought up the name “Anthrocene” even before Crutzen’s inspiration) aptly called it the “big zoom”.

Flesh on bones

• We’re part of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) that has been gathering evidence to put geological flesh on the bones of Crutzen’s concept.
• The AWG had a mandate: to assess the Anthropocene as a potential geological time unit during which “human modification of natural systems has become predominant”.

• It’s a nicely laid out, easy-to-understand picture that summarises the changes caused by human activity over the last million years.
• But what is lost here is any sense of the quantified rate and magnitude of change, other than by a little shading.
• The Y-axis is what scientists use to show the magnitude of measurements such as temperature and mass.

• They show that Crutzen’s Anthropocene is real, evidence based, and represents an epoch-scale change (at least).
• The repercussions cannot fail to last for many thousands of years – and some will change the Earth for ever.

Epoch vs event

• So the Anthropocene as an epoch is very different from the “event” of Erle Ellis and others, which encapsulates all human influence on the planet (and so is about a thousand times longer than the epoch, and differs in many other ways).
• ), it could perfectly well complement an Anthropocene epoch.
• That’s the Anthropocene as an epoch.

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• Colin Waters is Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group.
• Martin Head is part of the Anthropocene Working Group and the Quaternary Subcommission.

• Is it just noise, a side effect of evolution, or does it have functions?
• A research team at NYU Langone Health sought to answer the question by creating a large, synthetic gene, with its DNA code in reverse order from its natural parent.
• Then they put synthetic gene into yeast and mouse stem cells and watched transcription levels in each.
• The study authors use yeast cells to assemble long DNA sequences in a single step, and then deliver the them into mouse embryonic stem cells.

• Now a new study led by Nudler's team at NYU Langone Health reveals that their new technique, Long Range Cleavage sequencing (LORAX-seq), can directly detect where backtracking events begin and end.
• The results also suggest that persistent backtracking occurs frequently throughout genomes, happens more often near certain gene types, and has functions well beyond DNA repair.
• "If further work expands our findings to different developmental programs and pathological conditions, backtracking may be akin to epigenetics, the discovery of which revealed a surprising new layer of gene regulation without changing the DNA code."
• Locked, backtracked complexes are less likely to be rescued by TFIIS-driven cleavage, and more likely to delay transcription of the gene involved.