It is still not clear how prebiotic replicators evolved towards the complexity found in present day organisms. Within the most realistic scenario for prebiotic evolution, known as the RNA world hypothesis, such complexity has arisen from replicators consisting solely of RNA. Within contemporary life, remarkably many RNAs are involved in modifying other RNAs. In hindsight, such RNA-RNA modificat...

DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) are abrasions caused in both strands of the DNA duplex following exposure to both exogenous and endogenous conditions. Such abrasions have deleterious effect in cells leading to genome rearrangements and cell death. A number of repair systems including homologous recombination (HR) and non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) have been evolved to minimize the fatal effe...

It has been over a decade since the first observation that small non-coding RNAs can functionally modulate epigenetic states in human cells to achieve functional transcriptional gene silencing (TGS). TGS is mechanistically distinct from the RNA interference (RNAi) gene-silencing pathway. TGS can result in long-term stable epigenetic modifications to gene expression that can be passed on to daug...