Ayyuce Demirbas

“Zu den vielen Widersprüchlichkeiten des deutschen Nürnberg-Diskurses zählt daher, dass viele Deutsche zwar nach Kriegsende behaupteten, durch die Prozesse erstmals von den Gräueltaten an den Juden und anderen Minderheiten erfahren zu haben, an dererseits jedoch mit derselben Vehemenz versichert wurde, die Gerichtsverhandlung habe nichts zu Tage gefördert, was nicht schon vorher bekannt gewesen sei.”
― Annette Weinke, Die Nürnberger Prozesse

“According to the classical view, at best one would expect to find copies of complete genes hidden within the ENCODE regions under study. As with the rest of the genome, gene transcripts made up only a fraction of the sequences. Instead, it turned out that not one percent but between 74 and 93 percent of the DNA was copied into RNA. Four out of every five bases had been transcribed into at least one RNA molecule. In other words, an enormous amount of “junk” must have been transcribed.”
― Bernhard Kegel, Epigenetik. Wie Erfahrungen vererbt werden

“It begins with the siRNA binding to a collection of proteins called the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC). The RISC uses the siRNA as a template to search out matching mRNAs in the cell and degrade them. This serves both as a mechanism for regulating gene expression and as a defense against viruses. It also is a powerful tool for biology and medicine. It lets you temporarily “turn off” any gene you want. You can use it to treat a disease, or to study what happens when a gene is disabled. Just identify the mRNA you want to block, select any short segment of it, and create a siRNA molecule with the complementary sequence.”
― Bharath Ramsundar, Deep Learning for the Life Sciences: Applying Deep Learning to Genomics, Microscopy, Drug Discovery, and More

“The smallest living things known, the viroids, are composed of less than 10,000 atoms. They cause several different diseases in cultivated plants and have probably most recently evolved from more complex organisms rather than from simpler ones. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a still simpler organism that is in any sense alive. Viroids are composed exclusively of nucleic acid, unlike the viruses, which also have a protein coat. They are no more than a single strand of RNA with either a linear or a closed circular geometry. Viroids can be so small and still thrive because they are thoroughgoing, unremitting parasites. Like viruses, they simply take over the molecular machinery of a much larger, well-functioning cell and change it from a factory for making more cells into a factory for making more viroids.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos