From Newsgroup: talk.origins

https://www.science.org/content/article/molecular-quirk-unique-octopuses-makes-them-better-building-proteins

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.25.734654v2.full.pdf

The paper may not have passed peer review. I do not know what journal
they are submitting the paper to. It does not have a materials and
methods section, so it is not clear how they accomplished some of what
they claim to have done.

They found that one lineage of octopus cuts the ribosomal RNA in the E
helix. The break is in the middle of a highly conserved sequence that
has remained unchanged in octopus for around 100 million years. So
unlike all other organisms that have a single 28S rRNA in this lineage
the 28S RNA is broken into two fragments (it is no longer 28S). They
did some experiments and determined that the break allowed 2 fold
increase in fidelity (accuracy of putting in the correct amino acid)
without changing the rate of translation.

It is believed that errors in translation are associated with misfolded proteins and plaque formation that are associated with neurological
diseases such as Alzheimer's. They claim that squid deal with the issue
by having over active proteosomes that can absorb and degrade the
misfolded proteins. It seems to be a quirk of evolution and novel
feature of one lineage of octopus.

They do not know what is responsible for the rRNA break. The gene seems
to be encoded intact and it could be post transcription cleavage. It is
a unique adaptation, and this is the first example of it. It would be
neat if it could be adapted to humans. It isn't just neurological
disorders that are associated with misfolded proteins, but heart
attacks. The cellular response is called the UPR (unfolded protein
response).

It should be noted that CRISPR has been adapted to be able to make
strand breaks in specific sequences of RNA, so it could be a means to
adapt any species to have this type of 28S ribosomal two part sequence.

Ron Okimoto

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