49. The Edited Octopus

This has been a big month for cephalopod genetics, due to a paper in the journal Cell by Noa Liscovitch-Brauer and co-authors, reporting that octopuses and other “coleoid” cephalopods (cuttlefish, squid) engage in some unusual “editing” of the RNA in their cells. [1]

The usual rough picture is that DNA is “transcribed” to make RNA and then the sequence of units (nucleotides) in the RNA specifies the sequence of units (amino acids) in a protein. But the RNA in many organisms is “edited” – mod...