Saeed Roschdi is the lead author of the study and a PhD student in Butcher’s lab.īutcher and his PhD student Saeed Roschdi, lead author of the new study, wanted to learn more.įor the last several years, they have conducted experiments to investigate how pUGs work and whether they exist in genomes beyond the roundworm. In 2019, scientists at UW–Madison discovered an enzyme that adds pUGs to the ends of RNA molecules, forming “pUG tails.” Later, with colleagues at Harvard, they helped demonstrate that these pUG tails play a role in gene silencing in roundworms, and this gene silencing could also be inherited in their offspring - a process known as epigenetic inheritance. In the case of pUGs, or poly-uridine-guanosine, the nucleotides are repeating pairs of uridine (U) and guanosine (G). RNA has many important jobs inside of cells, like carrying instructions from DNA to make proteins, and is made up of a string of compounds called nucleotides. “This is an RNA quadruple helix that winds around itself four times into a cube shape.”Ĭells have many strands of RNA, or ribonucleic acid, with different kinds of sequences and shapes. Butcher, a professor of biochemistry at UW–Madison and a senior author of the study.
“People are familiar with the double helix of DNA,” says Samuel E. Butcher is a senior author of the new study and the Steenbock Professor of Biomolecular Structure in the Department of Biochemistry at UW–Madison.
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