Spliceosomes U4-U6

I'm catching up from weekend guests, so I'll just show you the rest of the major spliceosomes today and comment on the whole process next post. They complete the set which carries out the process of intron removal in RNA, which you can see in previous posts (spliceosome label at bottom of post).

Spliceosome U2

The DNA of a cell must be copied to RNA and that in turn is eventually used to create proteins. The RNA in a "true" cell, or eukaryote, is often edited before it becomes the template for the proteins. I showed the first part of this process and gave some background in a post a few weeks ago which you can see HERE. By the way, the picture here is only partial and shows the "major" but not the "minor" splicing mechanism. You can see that by going to Wikipeida HERE.

Some areas are removed before it goes on to produce protein (the editing part). There are five molecules which take part in the regular splicing activity (a different set occurs in some reactions, but I will not go into that). I showed the first part of the splicing process and the U1 molecule in the first post. The top picture today shows the rest of the splicing reaction and the picture below shows the U2 RNA molecule (Wikipedia HERE).

Vacation

Hello! It's nice to be back from "vacation" although I think I did as much on vacation as off. For one, I finished the second draft of my book. Now my husband, a writer and great editor, gets to read it and give me his advice. We belong to a writing group which meets from Sept. to May. I'll probably print out some copies for them to read and edit. I'll tell you more about it as we get closer to printing. And no, it doesn't have anything about ID in it. We self-publish, because I like to do all aspects of the book including the cover. I'm a slow writer and don't want to get into any deadlines with publishers. I do presentations on Intelligent Design, so I go back and forth between working on that and my book. And, this blog has become another enjoyable writing experience for me.

Another thing we did on my break was to sell our first items on ebay. It was interesting, since it did not go as smoothly as I hoped, but we got a wonderful price for the items we sold. They were 4 old TUCO puzzles, which have very thick pieces and were in my family for about 50 years. The puzzles were in good shape, although the boxes a little worn. I enjoyed watching the board of the puzzles for sale. The TUCO company had a lot of different puzzle pictures.

Next post, I'll show you more about the spliceosome of the cell. Then I will start telling you about some fascinating stories in the history of science.

July 4

May you have a blessed July 4th. I'm going to take a "staycation" for a week or two. In Michigan, one has to enjoy nice weather when one has it.

Hope you are having a good summer. I will be back soon.