Year: 2022

METABOLIC PLASTICITY. "It has been shown that many key biochemical steps can be catalyzed by two or more diverse, often unrelated enzyme forms, a phenomenon known as non-orthologous gene displacement." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

MOONLIGHTING FUNCTIONS. "Certain members of the ATP-grasp and cupin superfamilies lack (known) enzymatic activities and act solely as ATP-binding (synapsin), auxin-binding, or seed storage proteins. Many enzymes acquire such additional (typically non-enzymatic) functions even without the loss of their catalytic activity. This phenomenon, referred to as “moonlighting", is usually observed when the respective genes are expressed in atypical environments (tissue, cell organelle, or secreted)." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

PROTEIN FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY. "Moonlighting has since been demonstrated for a variety of glycolytic, TCA cycle, and other metabolic enzymes. It is now clear that moonlighting represents an important source of protein diversity in multicellular eukaryotes and is relevant for certain human diseases." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

PATCHWORK HYPOTHESIS. "Concerning the mechanisms of pathway assembly, both the analysis of completely sequenced genomes and directed evolution experiments strongly support the patchwork hypothesis, according to which metabolic pathways have been assembled through the recruitment of primitive enzymes that could react with a wide range of chemically related substrates." Bolt-on exaptations. https://lnkd.in/dNeshTu View in LinkedIn

GENE SWAPS. "The horizontal transfer of entire metabolic pathways or part thereof might have had a special role during the early stages of cellular evolution." https://lnkd.in/dxwrfTm View in LinkedIn

DIVERSITY OF STRUCTURES. "This paper will delve more deeply into the origin of natural products with an emphasis on the fundamental problem of just how such an extraordinary and bewildering array of structure types has arisen through evolutionary processes." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

FREE ENERGY. "All processes are driven by changes in free energy, which in turn is made up of two parts, enthalpy and entropy. Since all systems try to go to their highest states of randomness (increase in entropy), naturally occurring ordered states must arise through enthalpic compensation." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

"STRUCTURES that self-organize (crystals, double helical DNA, etc) do so because of compensating energy factors (e.g. favorable intramolecular attractions such as hydrogen bonding); whereas, systems that appear to "spontaneously" self organize (e.g. life) may well involve self-ordering components but also require an external source of energy to compensate for unfavorable entropy." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

TENDENCY TO DISORDER. "Information theory showed that entropy and information are inversely related such that an increase in information is equivalent to a decrease in entropy. Thus, the agents of information (in our case, natural products) are employed by nature to overcome the natural tendency toward disorder, and, fueled by the energy from the sun, or other less common sources of energy here on earth, these small molecules have become indispensable for life on this planet." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

GREATER THAN THE SUM. "The hallmark of these systems is that...they are not fully explained by an understanding of their component parts, i.e., they seem not to be readily analyzed by reductionist processes." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn