Source: Stanford University Medical Center
Date: March 20, 2011
Summary:
If a big bunch of your brain cells suddenly went rogue and decided to become fat cells, it could cloud your decision-making capacity a bit. Fortunately, early in an organism's development, cells make firm and more-or-less permanent decisions about whether they will live their lives as, say, skin cells, brain cells or, well, fat cells. A new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine may help solve the mystery of how . The researchers discovered how a particular variety of the biomolecule RNA that had been thought to be largely irrelevant to cellular processes plays a dynamic regulatory role in protein selection. In unraveling this molecular mechanism, the study also offers enticing clues as to how certain cancers may arise. The study is published online March 20 in Nature.
