Category: Uncategorized

PARENT-OFFSPRING CONFLICTS. "Parents make decisions of allocations to offspring before the "meiotic veil of ignorance", whereas offspring compete for resources “from behind the veil”. These parent-offspring conflicts are likely at the origin of parental imprints that occur on some genes at or just before meiosis." http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/04/28/050831.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

GAMING TRANSPOSONS. "The second class of selfish genetic elements consists of meiotic drivers that exploit the asymmetry of female meiosis. These elements achieve transmission in excess of 50% by preferentially moving into the meiotic products that will eventually become the eggs or megaspores." http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/04/28/050831.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

CHEATING TRANSPOSONS. "These selfish genetic elements fall into two classes. Killer selfish genetic elements kill cells that have not inherited the element. In principle, such killers could operate during meiosis (the hypothetical ‘sister killers’ as discussed above), but the numerous killer selfish genetic elements that have so far been described operate postmeiotically, e.g. by killing sibling sperm." https://lnkd.in/e2tp_G5 View in LinkedIn

GENETIC CHEATING. "A striking feature of meiosis is its apparent fairness: under Mendel’s first law of inheritance, each allele has a 50% chance of ending up in any given gamete. However, there are many selfish genetic elements that increase their chances above 50% by subverting the mechanism of meiosis." http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/04/28/050831.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION OF SEX? "Why is sexuality (and meiosis) so common? This is one of the important unanswered questions in biology and has been the focus of much research beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century." https://lnkd.in/exK5mn7 View in LinkedIn

LOADED OOCYTES. "In other cases, asymmetrical meiosis in females results in a large oocyte full of resources, which may favour the production of a single cell rather than four." http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/04/28/050831.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

DOMINANT QUESTION. "The mysteries of meiosis call for new developments of evolutionary theory. Overall, all these mysteries tend to have been overshadowed by the famous question of the maintenance of sex." http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/04/28/050831.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

Pressure grows for UK to bring in blanket ban on ivory trade View in LinkedIn

Plastic microbeads ban enters force in UK View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this summary of Professor Denis Nobel’s thinking, as outlined in his book Dance to the Tune of Life. The central dogma of molecular biology was formulated by Francis Crick in 1958. Often stated as “DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein”, in essence it states that once information gets into protein, it cannot get out again, and is unidirectional in flow, and information cannot flow from protein to protein or from protein to nucleic acid. Well, in the sixty years since this proposition, we have learned a lot, and the dogma has been modified. https://lnkd.in/eQDmUtj View in LinkedIn