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Slow life saves from deadly mutations

05.08.2019

If a mutation spoils some very important gene, then it would be natural to expect that with such a mutation the organism will not last long, and will die during embryonic development. On the other hand, there are cases when an important gene is simply absent in the genome, and this does not affect health in any way. Usually in such cases it is said that the genome is a system with a sufficiently high reliability, that genes can "insure" each other, and that the work of genes depends on the current context. One can imagine that the context was such that an important gene turned out to be unimportant, and a harmful mutation turned out to be harmless.

But context is too general a word. Scientists from Northwestern University (Chicago, USA) investigated one of the context options - metabolic rate. Experiments were performed with Drosophila larvae, in which a whole class of genes encoding microregulatory RNAs (miRNAs) was switched off. These RNAs are small molecules that interact with other "large" messenger RNAs and prevent them from synthesizing proteins. That is, miRNAs inhibit protein synthesis. In this role, they are very important just for individual development, when you need to constantly turn on some genes and proteins, and turn off others. And so all such miRNAs were turned off in Drosophila, and they expected that the flies would develop defects incompatible with life.

Indeed, it was so, but only in those fruit flies in which the metabolism proceeded at a normal rate. It was enough to slow down the metabolism at least by half (and for this, for example, it is enough to put flies on a starvation ration), as the negative effect of the missing regulatory RNAs almost disappeared. The organism did not seem to notice that a whole class of molecular genetic regulators had been taken away from it.

When interacting with each other, genes and proteins rely on feedback, when a signal from a partner helps to correct their own activity. But with a normal metabolism, feedback may not have time to work, which is why the role of assistant regulators is so important. If the metabolism slows down, then you can already do without them. It is likely that other dangerous mutations can also become harmless under changing environmental conditions, and this is probably one of the explanations for why abstinence in food helps to stay healthy longer - cells can afford to ignore some genetic problems.

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