“The traditional view of mRNA as a pure intermediate between DNA and protein has changed in the last decades since the discovery of numerous RNA processing pathways. A frequent RNA modification is A-to-I editing, or the conversion of adenosine (A) to inosine (I).”
Hah. One more inflection point in the complexity of molecular biology. I think the reality is that life doesn’t give a hoot about the individual organism, but is one gigantic randomization engine (or should I say, purposeful variation), sampling adjacent possibles, giving rise to genomic variants of all sorts, with some variants tending towards even greater complexity and randomization techniques. [Hm, that’s a brain wave developing there…]
