Re: New Nucleotide In DNA Could Revolutionize Epigenetics

"Robert Karl Stonjek" <rstonjek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:gsae44$22f8$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
New Nucleotide In DNA Could Revolutionize Epigenetics
ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2009) - Anyone who studied a little genetics in high
school has heard of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine - the A, T, G and
C that make up the DNA code. But those are not the whole story. The rise of
epigenetics in the past decade has drawn attention to a fifth nucleotide,
5-methylcytosine (5-mC), that sometimes replaces cytosine in the famous DNA
double helix to regulate which genes are expressed. And now there's a sixth:
5-hydroxymethylcytosine.

In experiments to be published online April 16 by Science, researchers
reveal an additional character in the mammalian DNA code, opening an
entirely new front in epigenetic research. ...

Cool. But when I Googled to find out just what 5-hydroxymethyl cytosine
looks like, I found this 1974 paper near the top of the hit list:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1178489
Biochem J. 1972 February; 126(4): 781-790.
The presence of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine in animal deoxyribonucleic acid
N. W. Penn,* R. Suwalski, C. O'Riley, K. Bojanowski, and R. Yura
Quoting from the abstract:
A method is given for small-scale preparation of DNA from 1.0-1.5g of
adult rat tissues. ...It contains 5-hydroxymethylcytosine at a content of
about 15% of the total cytosine bases present. 5-Hydroxymethylcytosine
is also demonstrable in mouse and frog brain DNA and in the crude cytidylic
acid fractions obtained from RNA hydrolysates of rat brain and liver.

Revolutions proceed slowly in biochemistry, and require years of press
releases, each proclaiming surprise.

.

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