[HN Gopher] Viral Knots
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Viral Knots
        
       Author : _Microft
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2021-08-08 14:38 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blogs.sciencemag.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blogs.sciencemag.org)
        
       | philsnow wrote:
       | Do the RNAses become irrevocably "stuck" when they try to process
       | the 5' end of one of the pictured zika RNA molecules? It seems
       | so:
       | 
       | > These things pile up inside the cell and start disrupting all
       | sorts of other cellular processes in turn (such as the ones that
       | respond to viral attack!) making for a more successful infection.
       | 
       | If so, that sounds like a really good way to asymmetrically use
       | up a ton of cell resources, since RNAses are huge (on the order
       | of 10k base pairs) compared to the dinky little "knots" (the one
       | pictured looks to be no more than ~100bp).
       | 
       | I have no intuition for how thoroughly stuck they get -- maybe
       | they just keep 'trying' to process the RNA until they degrade?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-08-08 23:01 UTC)