Toronto researchers have discovered that a single molecular event in our cells could hold the key to how we evolved to become the smartest animal on the planet.
Benjamin Blencowe, a professor in the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre and Banbury Chair in Medical Research, and his team have uncovered how a small change in a protein called PTBP1 can spur the creation of neurons -- cells that make the brain -- that could have fuelled the evolution of mammalian brains to become the largest and most complex among vertebrates.
...
The key lays in the process that Blencowe's group studies, known as alternative splicing (AS), whereby gene products are assembled into proteins, which are the building blocks of life. During AS, gene fragments -- called exons -- are shuffled to make different protein shapes. It's like LEGO, where some fragments can be missing from the final protein shape.AS enables cells to make more than one protein from a single gene, so that the total number of different proteins in a cell greatly surpasses the number of available genes. A cell's ability to regulate protein diversity at any given time reflects its ability to take on different roles in the body. Blencowe's previous work showed that AS prevalence increases with vertebrate complexity. So although the genes that make bodies of vertebrates might be similar, the proteins they give rise to are far more diverse in animals such as mammals, than in birds and frogs.
So...it turns out the answer to why we're smarter than chickens is not because we don't pass hraka where we silflay.
An alternative splicing event amplifies evolutionary differences between vertebrates [abstract]
(Score: 5, Touché) by MrGuy on Monday August 24 2015, @06:22PM
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." --DA