🎉🎉🎉🎉🧬⚖️💙💙💙

Huge thanks to incredible artists @nora.bsky.social and Janie Kim for collaborating on this project and bringing my vision to life in this beautiful piece!!

The characterization of DragonRNA as a serial, chimeric DNA-->RNA monster expands the possibilities for biotechnology, biology research, and understanding of the interplay of evolving nucleic acids at the dawn of life.

This art piece by Nora Trapp, Janie Kim, and Emily Greenwald alludes to the fantastical nature of synthetic biology’s advancements, while telling the story of DragonRNA.

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

waiting to be extended into their DragonRNA forms. The castle wall depicts an artistic rendition of a fluorescence gel-shift assay designed to demonstrate an enzyme’s potential for DragonRNA activity.

Thank you!!!

Thank you so much for helping me with figures and especially the beautiful dragon flying through the abstract and the beautiful, fantastical science art telling the story of the paper that I’ll share soon!!! 🥰

I’m so excited that this project is out there and thankful for the support of my PhD advisors, Andy and @sbmontgom.bsky.social, and fantastic collaborators, Drew, Joon, Nimit, Bijoyita, and Whitney!

Finally, this project provides some really interesting insight into the evolution from the RNA world hypothesis to the RNA-protein world to the central dogma, because this shows a further characterization of RNA and DNA to extend each other, and shows flexibility of RNA polymerases.

DragonRNA may be more stable than mRNAs in biotechnology due to the 5’ DNA cap. It will be essential to determine whether DragonRNA activity takes place in vivo or in cells, though we found promoter-containing double-stranded templates under the right conditions did limit this activity (Fig 10).

We propose a mechanism (Figs 12) of DragonRNA activity that begins with the input DNA priming between its 3’ end and elsewhere in the sequence & the DNA covalently extended with RNA. In some reactions, the now DragonRNA performs multiple rounds of synthesis to generate longer DragonRNAs.

We also found that multi-round extension could re-prime in the RNA portion & thus allow for a portion of DragonRNA to be templated, at least in part, by the RNA tail (Fig 4, Supp Files S2 and S3). We showed DragonRNA activity across 7 out of 8 tested RNA polymerases in our gel shift assay (Fig 9).

The ability to prime between a free 3’ end & elsewhere in the sequence was sufficient to allow DragonRNA extension (Figs 5, 6), & such priming could take place in cis (with the same strand as both primer and template) or in trans (with one strand as primer and another as template) (Figs 7, 11).

We describe our discovery of DragonRNA activity by mitochondrial RNA polymerases (Figs 1-3), determined that the RNA portion is templated by the DNA input (Fig 4), & that DragonRNA can be engineered using designed distinct DNA primers & templates to engineer DragonRNAs (Figs 11, S10, & S11).

Thank you for sharing with me!!!

@roshnipatel.bsky.social @raungar.bsky.social

YESSSS!!!! Congratulations! So happy to hear this!

Recipe courtesy of Nosh cookbook by Micah Siva!

One approach could be to teach about sources to trust—primary, peer reviewed research literature that they read and took time to critique methods and think about if the results and interpretations are reliable versus people and websites without sources or with unreliable sources.