Month: September 2022

MANGROVE FISH SELFING PREFERRED. "Outcrossing can be quite prevalent and can drive substantial levels of heterozygosity in some populations, but the most common mode of reproduction for mangrove rivulus is self-fertilization or ‘selfing’. Repeated bouts of selfing can result in completely homozygous individuals capable of producing offspring that are genetically identical to the parent and all siblings." https://lnkd.in/dfG4sX2 View in LinkedIn

MANGROVE FISH SELFING CONSEQUENCES. "Because sex change is environmentally driven and because rivulus produces isogenic lineages via selfing, hermaphrodites and secondary males with identical genotypes can be produced." https://lnkd.in/dfG4sX2 View in LinkedIn

MANGROVE FISH PATH ENERGETICALLY CHOSEN. "Hermaphroditic rivulus must maintain both ovarian and testicular tissues while males only need to maintain testicular tissue...hermaphrodites appear to be allocating more energy towards gonad maintenance and function and less towards somatic growth – a classic life history trade-off." https://lnkd.in/dfG4sX2 View in LinkedIn

LOWER MALE MANGROVE FISH COSTS. "Males are liberated from the costs of maintaining energetically expensive ovarian tissue, exhibit lower maximum metabolic rates, and allocate more resources towards growth and energy storage in the form of visceral fat reserves and larger liver mass." https://lnkd.in/dfG4sX2 View in LinkedIn

MANGROVE FISH FEMALE COSTS. "We suspect that the cost of maintaining ovarian tissue is a key factor underlying the transition between hermaphrodite and secondary male. We predict that when the benefit of possessing ovarian tissue is reduced by energetic demand (resource limitation, competition) or when age/senescence increases the costs of maintaining ovarian tissue, transitioning into male should be favored." https://lnkd.in/dfG4sX2 View in LinkedIn

Catalonia elections prompt crackdown on colour yellow? As campaigning for Catalonia's regional election begins, yellow lights and even yellow fountains are not allowed. https://lnkd.in/dyXQpU4 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for the next two weekends contemplates biological information, how it is organized, and how it may contribute to the transition from inert molecules to that which we call life, what I like to call the Grey Zone. This is at the heart of the issue of the origin of life, and at the heart of how we would even recognize life on another planet. As humans, we have a very, very, modest grip on this topic. View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. “Of the many open questions surrounding how life emerges from non-life, perhaps the most challenging is the vast gulf between complex chemistry and the simplest biology: even the smallest mycoplasma is immeasurably more complex than any chemical reaction network we might engineer in the laboratory with current technology.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

VERY UNIQUE. “The chemist George Whitesides, for example, has stated, ‘How remarkable is life? The answer is: very. Those of us who deal in networks of chemical reactions know of nothing like it’.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

“THE HEART OF THE ISSUE is that we do not know whether the living state is ‘just’ very complex chemistry, or whether there is something fundamentally distinct about living matter.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn