Month: September 2022

CONUNDRUM. "For darwinism the CNGs are a conundrum — highly conserved sequences with no known function. Well, they must have a function, but what is it? And how could they have been gradually composed, and yet so tightly constrained?" (CNG = conserved nongenic (non-gene).sequences). https://lnkd.in/eFvUyrd View in LinkedIn

China's giant space telescope starts search for alien life View in LinkedIn

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will invest $3 billion to cure disease http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/21/technology/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-3-billion-health-disease/index.html View in LinkedIn

NON-CODING DNA, formerly "junk-DNA" continues to pose a remarkable challenge to geneticists and evolutionary scientists. On one hand, the Viral World camp with ever-expanding regulatory roles for these RNAs are eroding the old and outworn concept of functionless junk; but there are still apologists for junk DNA whose argument resides in the fact we cannot (yet) ascribe all the functions to that big non-coding chunk of genomes. A work in process. View in LinkedIn

JUNK DNA APOLOGIST AND CONTRARIANS (Alexander Palazzo, and T. Ryan Gregory, among others) make the case that most non-coding DNA has (so far) not had a function assigned to it. They raise excellent points about how little we know about their functioning. Since the majority of the genome is non-coding DNA, genome size differences are of considerable relevance. Deep dive to follow. https://lnkd.in/eT5V5Xc View in LinkedIn

"GENOME SIZE varies enormously among species: at least 7,000-fold among animals and 350-fold even within vertebrates." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

UNRELATED TO COMPLEXITY. "Genome size varies independently of intuitive notions of organism complexity or presumed number of protein-coding genes. For example, a human genome contains eight times more DNA than that of a pufferfish but is 40 times smaller than that of a lungfish." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

LARGE GENOMES. "Organisms that have very large genomes are not few in number or outliers—for example, of the >200 salamander genomes analyzed thus far, all are between four and 35 times larger than the human genome." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

RELATIVE DIFFERENCES. "Even closely related species with very similar biological properties and the same ploidy level can differ significantly in genome size." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

THE ONION TEST. "The domestic onion, Allium cepa, is a diploid plant (2n = 16) with a haploid genome size of roughly 16 billion base pairs (16 Gbp), or about five times larger than humans." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn