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An inevitable consequence of the confluence of biology and electronics. Game changer. http://www.thelowdownblog.com/2017/07/why-you-will-one-day-have-chip-in-your.html View in LinkedIn

THIRD ALTERNATIVE. "In November, 2005, researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Georgia proposed that, rather than a novel genetic mechanism causing the reversion, the HTH gene product might be a metabolic enzyme, which when mutated produces toxic and mutagenic compounds that act on the DNA." http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/26000/title/Mendel-upended-/ View in LinkedIn

ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION. "Ray's colleague and friend, Abed Chaudhury, a researcher at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, suggested another mechanism, based on two phenomena. The first was DNA homology: He suggested that small homologous sequences of Arabidopsis genome could be translated into RNA." https://lnkd.in/dv6b49K View in LinkedIn

POSSIBLE EXPLANATION. "In a communication to Nature, Ray proposed that DNA heteroduplexes had conserved the wild-type alleles; fragments of chromosomes carried on the two independent parental DNA chains were used in a form of mismatch repair to restore the mutants to wild-type, and could account for some of the reversion." http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/26000/title/Mendel-upended-/ View in LinkedIn

IMPORTANT FINDING. "A non-Mendelian system of inheritance has "enormous implications," says Lolle, with the potential to unseat nearly two centuries of assumptions in genetic research. Suddenly during their conversation, the reporter blurted out "someone just broke the embargo - wow, this is going to be bigger than Dolly! The paper was a really Big Bang." https://lnkd.in/dv6b49K View in LinkedIn

PARADIGM BUSTER. "If you take this mutant Arabidopsis, which has two copies of the altered gene, let it seed and then plant the seeds, 90 percent of the offspring will look like the parent, but 10 percent will look like the normal grandparents. Our genetic training tells us that's just not possible. This challenges everything we believe." https://lnkd.in/dtXtGxH View in LinkedIn

EXTRANUCLEAR INHERITANCE. "Extranuclear inheritance is a non-Mendelian form of heredity that involves genetic information located in cytoplasmic organelles, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts, rather than on the chromosomes found in the cell nucleus.” https://lnkd.in/dwqn4Df View in LinkedIn

"NON-MENDELIAN INHERITANCE is when extranuclear genetic elements are involved or gene conversion alters the allelic proportions." https://lnkd.in/dW8_gaj View in LinkedIn

MENDELIAN INHERITANCE has a number of exceptions that have come to light since Mendel. These include: infectious heredity (L and M viruses, prions); extra nuclear inheritance; genomic imprinting; mosaicism; trinucleotide repeat disorders; gene conversion; epigenetics; CoRR hypothesis for plasmids; Intragenomic conflict and transposons; segregation distortion; homing endonuclease genes; B chromosomes; cytoplasmic genes (anisogamy; feminization; male killing; male sterility); parthenogenesis; cytoplasmic incompatibility; green beard effect. https://lnkd.in/dVC7Cmh View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE is about reverse speciation, which is almost a Darwinian heresy. Niche exploitation by becoming increasingly specialized has been well studied, exemplified in Darwin’s finches and in orchid-pollinator relationships. As species become more specialized, breeding isolation results in the formation of new species. For a long time, biologists thought that there were examples where specialization could lead to evolutionary dead-ends and species extinction. In recent years, this has been re-examined. View in LinkedIn