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FLABBERGASTING UNKNOWN. "With nearly all of its nutrients supplied through growth media, syn3.0’s essential genes tend to be those involved in cellular chores such as making proteins, copying DNA and building cellular membranes. Astoundingly, Venter says that his team could not identify the function of 149 of the genes in syn3.0’s genome, many of which are found in other life forms, including humans. “We don’t know about a third of essential life, and we’re trying to sort that out now,” he says." http://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-race-to-harness-synthetic-life-1.19633 View in LinkedIn

SYNTHIA. "Synthetic biology is likely to move from construction of new biochemical pathways towards construction of entirely novel organisms." https://lnkd.in/eKjEK6c View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL ARTIFICIAL DNA. "We refer to the cell we have created as being a synthetic cell because it is a cell controlled by a genome assembled from chemically synthesized pieces of DNA." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

START WITH CODE. "We now show that it is possible to reverse this and synthesize cells starting from this digitized information." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

1010-GATC. "We call this digitizing biology." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

DNA SOFTWARE. "Life is a DNA software system. All living things are solely reducible to DNA and the cellular apparatus it uses to run on. The DNA software both creates and directs the more visible "hardware" of life such as proteins and cells." (Craig Venter) https://lnkd.in/dmEGVWN View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR SENSITIVITY. "Plants are also able to sense the number and frequency of stem bending events. When several bends are imposed on poplar stems, the impact on the transcriptome becomes less pronounced from the second bending event onwards. It also takes no less than a week without bending for a stem to recover full molecular sensitivity to such mechanical deformation." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

PLANT NUMERACY. "There is evidence that plants are able to record the number and frequency of mechanical stimuli. The Venus flytrap uses action potentials to measure the number of times an insect touches the trigger hairs of its trap over the course of an hour." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

"THREE HALLMARKS of thigmomorphogenesis are: a dose responsiveness that prevents the plant from responding to isolated events, a systemic nature such that a stimulus applied to one organ leads to changes in overall plant morphology, and a characteristic delay between the initial stimulus and the developmental response." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

REGULATOR VALIDATION. "We show here that the Arabidopsis Paf1 complex is a critical factor for stem and root thigmomorphogenesis, stereotypical alterations in plant form that are made in response to repeated mechanical disturbance." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn