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Adaptive mechanisms such as activation and use of cryptic splice sites or alternative transcription start sites as well as nonsense-associated alternative splicing and skipped exons maintaining reading frame shore up a sea of mutations expected to cause premature translation termination and loss of function. Artist: Neta Shwartz. |
What can zebrafish teach us about our survival in the face of mutations? | Carnegie Institution for Science
What would you do if you were an intelligent, omniscient, omnipotent designer and found that your perfect design kept going wrong in unexpected and unpredictable ways?
Well, if you were a creationist intelligent designer it seems, you would still regard yourself as an omniscience, omnipotent, perfect designer but you would wouldn't improve your design so it
didn't keep going randomly wrong - because it's already perfect! Instead, you would set about designing a clunky workaround that went some way towards rectifying those omniscient mistakes and you would settle for near enough is good enough - apparently.
This is (leaving out the intelligent designer nonsense) what researchers Steven Farber, Jennifer Anderson and colleagues, of the Carnegie Institution have show happens in the zebrafish to cope with detrimental mutations. Rather than putting up with mutations resulting in individuals failing and being removed from the population gene pool, zebrafish, and maybe lots of other species, have evolved mechanisms for coping with them by either neutralising them or at least minimising their detrimental effects.
According to the Carnegie Institution press release: