Month: September 2022

NEW THINKING. "This collective knowledge compels a paradigm shift—one in which maternal transmission of microbes advances from a taxonomically specialized phenomenon to a universal one in animals." https://lnkd.in/ds5gpCY View in LinkedIn

WIDESPREAD. "Maternal provisioning of microbes to developing offspring is widespread in animals, with evidence of internal microbial transmission in animal phyla as diverse as Porifera, Mollusca, Arthropoda, and Chordata." https://lnkd.in/ds5gpCY View in LinkedIn

ANCIENT MATERNAL INHERITANCE. "The presence of maternal transmission at the base of the Animalia kingdom and the surprising plasticity by which microbes gain access to germ cells or embryos in these systems signifies that maternal symbiont transmission is an ancient and evolutionarily advantageous mechanism inherent in animals, including humans." https://lnkd.in/ds5gpCY View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this contemplation of inheritance of symbionts, the loss of the biological individual, and the idea that we are genetic mosaics of many species, and the seemingly outlandish idea that the permanent cellular powerhouses (the mitochondria and chloroplast), could have come about by engulfment of a foreign species, is made more credible by the universal symbiosis between species, genetic streamlining and metabolic outsourcing. View in LinkedIn

DEEP LINK. "The tight coupling between the earliest stages of viral and cellular evolution." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

VIRAL DIVERSITY. "With the sole exception of large dsDNA viruses, all major classes of viruses display greater diversity in eukaryotes than in prokaryotes." (dsDNA = double stranded DNA). https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

EUK MELTING POT. "This implicates the emerging eukaryotic cell as a second, after the primordial gene pool, melting pot of virus evolution, in which extensive mixing and matching of viral and cellular genes molded a new domain of the virus world." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

GENE FLUX. "The relationships between bacteriophage genes and those of eukaryotic viruses imply that the mitochondria and, possibly, other, transient endosymbionts also contributed many genes from their phage gene pool to the emerging eukaryotic viruses." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

EUK VIRUSES. "Based on the current knowledge of bacterial and archaeal virus genomics, bacteriophages of the endosymbiont(s) played a much greater role in the origin of eukaryotic viruses than archaeal selfish elements." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

EUK GENOME ORIGINS. "The pivotal contribution of prokaryotic viruses to the origin of eukaryotic viral genomes appears to be as strongly supported by the conservation of the hallmark genes across most of the virus world as the original emergence of viruses from the primordial gene pool." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn