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Through the Looking Glass, and What Zheludev et al. (2024) Found There—Asterisk

asteriskmag.com · 4,168 words · saved by 1 readers

Every time microbiologists develop a new way of looking, they find that there’s more to see than they expected. Recently, a team at Stanford University fished something new out of the vast, uncharted, and almost entirely unclassified world of genetic material sometimes known as biological dark matter. They called it an “obelisk,” a shell-less RNA of maybe 1,000 base pairs (shorter than any viral genome), which seems to self-organize into a rodlike shape. It appears to be the structural equivalent of a plant viroid or a fungal ambivirus, two other bits of self-replicating genetic material whose discovery widened the boundaries of what we know about microbiology. But the obelisks weren’t found in either plants or fungi. They were discovered in human intestines. An obelisk, in other words, is a probably replicating entity, contained in a mere thousand or so letters of the genetic alphabet, with zero genetic similarity to anything known to exist already. What does it do? How did it get the

Through the Looking Glass, and What Zheludev et al. (2024) Found There—Asterisk Every time microbiologists develop a new way of looking, they find that there’s more to see than they expected. Recently, a team at Stanford University fished something new out of the vast, uncharted, and almost entirely unclassified world of genetic material sometimes known as biological dark matter. They called it an “obelisk,” a shell-less RNA of maybe 1,000 base pairs (shorter than any viral genome), which seems to self-organize into a rodlike shape. It appears to be the structural equivalent of a plant viroid

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