Oh, nothing. Just re-editing my neural RNA when it gets cold.

June 10, 2023 5:08 AM

Octopuses Can Rewire Their 'Brains' by Editing Their Own RNA on The Fly. "Temperature-sensitive editing occurred at about one third of our sites – over 20,000 individual places... [P]roteins that are edited tend to be neural proteins, and almost all sites that are temperature sensitive are more highly edited in the cold." Study. "RNA editing is rarely used for protein recoding in most organisms."
posted by clawsoon (17 comments total)

"I become a different person when I'm cold, Paul"
posted by lalochezia at 5:14 AM on June 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hot or cold, still delicious.
posted by slogger at 5:42 AM on June 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Reading into the paper, what appears to be special about this type of RNA editing is that it's not the usual "cut out the introns" stuff. It's actually targeting specific "A"s in the RNA and rubbing off parts of them so that they look like "G"s. Or, as they put it:

Catalyzed by the ADAR (adenosine deaminases that act on RNA) family of enzymes, specific adenosines are converted to inosine, a mimic for guanosine during translation and other biological processes.

This has real "we'll just fix it in post" energy.
posted by clawsoon at 6:40 AM on June 10, 2023 [14 favorites]

Octopuses Can Rewire Their 'Brains' by Editing Their Own RNA on The Fly

Wait. You mean you humans can’t?

Interesting…
posted by Thorzdad at 7:02 AM on June 10, 2023

Hot or cold, still delicious.

If Octopuses Are Really Smart, Should We Eat Them?

Millions of people eat octopus- here's why we shouldn't

Do you care about animals? Then you really shouldn't eat octopus

The Case Against Octopus Farming
posted by y2karl at 7:02 AM on June 10, 2023 [21 favorites]

The press release title is a bit misleading, since they don't appear to rewire, i.e. it's not about reconnecting neurons. It's more that they switch a whole bunch of proteins to cold-adapted versions using the "A to kinda-looks-like-G" hack.
posted by clawsoon at 7:15 AM on June 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

...We make rather a point of denying the intelligence of the creatures that we do routinely eat: cows, sheep and chickens are usually portrayed as silly. Pigs are clearly intelligent, but they are contemptible and that makes their consumption OK. To call anyone a cow, sheep, pig or chicken is an insult. We need to despise what’s on the menu but we can’t despise intelligence, as that would be to despise ourselves.

Jeremy Bentham nailed the issue in the 18th century: ‘The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?’

The issue of food choice is deeply personal. Emotional and ethical concerns have been changing diets over the past half–century. The octopus documentary has raised further sensibilities: can we really eat creatures that are so much like us? But the fact is that animals are not like us. They are us. We all belong to the kingdom Animalia. We have tried again and again to deny it across the millennia, but it’s unavoidable. The octopus proves that truth.

The ethics of eating octopus
posted by y2karl at 9:27 AM on June 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's not like I ate octopus all the time before, but at some point recently, I just had to stop.

We understand so little about our animal cousins.
posted by praemunire at 10:35 AM on June 10, 2023 [12 favorites]

The most relevant Wikipedia article I've been able to find so far: RNA editing
posted by clawsoon at 10:39 AM on June 10, 2023

Quirks and Quarks had a segment on this today as well.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 10:48 AM on June 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

just some jar opening vids, and an escape; more escapes
[don't think about skulls]
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:57 AM on June 10, 2023

Oh, great. I'm thinking about skulls now. I didn't even watch the videos, but I'm just thinking about skulls.
posted by Grangousier at 2:04 AM on June 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Very cool! But maybe outdone by this cuttlefish acing an adapted version of The Marshmallow Test”
posted by rongorongo at 3:36 AM on June 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

from the comments: "Knowing I have less self control than a cuttlefish has done wonders for my self esteem"
posted by lalochezia at 4:48 AM on June 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Hot or cold, still delicious.

Octopi should edit themselves to taste bad, or even better, to become poisonous.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:10 AM on June 12, 2023

Sounds like a good tweek for people who suffer from leukemia but our cells are based on DNA not RNA so probably to complicated to edit.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 4:10 PM on June 12, 2023

Narrative_Historian: Sounds like a good tweek for people who suffer from leukemia but our cells are based on DNA not RNA so probably to complicated to edit.

Our DNA gets transcribed to RNA, and my impression is that we also get a bunch of last-minute edits to our RNA, though not to nearly the same massive, coordinated extent that cephalopods are doing it.

The Wikipedia page for the enzyme that does this specific A-to-fake-G edit, ADAR, lists some health effects in humans of the editing either not happening when it should, or happening too much when it shouldn't:

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)... When there is failure of RNA-editing due to downregulation of TDP-43, motor neurons devoid of ADAR2 enzymes express unregulated, leading to abnormally permeable Ca2+ channels.

Cancer... Researchers observed high levels of oncogenetic A-to-I editing in circular RNA precursors, directly confirming ADAR's relationship to cancer.

Hepatocellular carcinoma... Studies of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have shown trends of upregulated ADAR1 and downregulated ADAR2... The imbalance in ADAR expression could change the frequency of A to I transitions in the protein coding region of genes, resulting in mutated proteins which drive the disease.

Melanoma... Studies have indicated that loss of ADAR1 contributes to melanoma growth and metastasis... When ADAR is downregulated by CREB the unedited miR-455-5p downregulates a tumor suppressor protein called CPEB1, contributing to melanoma progression in an in vivo model.

We're discovering a whole world of last minute fixes to RNA that happens after transcription from DNA and before translation to protein that I am not even close to wrapping my head around. There's RNA that blocks other RNA, there are spliceosomes that edit out sections of RNA, there's whatever it is that snoRNA is doing to RNA... there are apparently over 130 different kinds of RNA modification that we've discovered so far.

So it's possible that your idea could be made to work! ...though the hard part would be navigating all the unexpected side effects caused by the insanely complicated Rube Goldberg machine that is the DNA->protein pathway.
posted by clawsoon at 6:22 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]