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JUST A CHINK OF NATURE. “Analogously, classical biology describes the familiar world of multi-cellular eukaryotes, which historically were believed to be the biosphere. New tools are now making it possible to study the vast, heretofore mostly uncharacterized, prokaryotic world of microbial life.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

JUST A CHINK OF THE UNIVERSE. “Steven Weinberg elegantly captured the duality between classical physics and the new quantum cosmology: “Our expanding universe is mostly dark energy and dark matter. In this darkness there is a small admixture, a few percent of the whole, which consists of the ordinary matter that makes up the stars and planets and us.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

WRENCHING CHANGES. “Not only will biodiversity informatics need to deal with an explosion in the amount of biodiversity-relevant data, it may well need to accommodate data that are of a conceptually different form. As any informatics professional knows, making changes to an underlying data model is always difficult and fraught with risk. Making changes to conceptual base classes is the hardest of all. This will be the world of 21st Century biodiversity informatics.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

WE RETURN to the bold attempt to revise our pear-shaped view of the natural world, which has been cast with a chordate-centric viewpoint, oblivious of the much larger and, until recently, unseen, prokaryotic universe. The prokaryotic universe is the greatest source of global biodiversity, and it is neither based on the individual nor the species. All very confounding for our earnest and bespectacled colleagues in gumboots. https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this expansion of the observation of the rapid evolution of Great Tits’ beaks in response to bird feeders in the UK. The backstory tells us that this is a broad trend across taxa, and that it is particularly observed in response to human disruption. The opportunity to watch in real time vertebrate evolution in the making is an extraordinary step forward, as such studies in the past have been confined to yeast and bacteria. View in LinkedIn

ACCESSIBLE TO STUDY. “Empirically, the reality of contemporary evolution means that many evolutionary processes thought approachable only by inferential study, such as speciation, can now be studied directly.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

NEW CONVERSATION. “The frequency, magnitude and importance of evolution on ecological time-scales are likely to grow as human environmental impacts increase and their effects ramify. The dialogue in evolutionary biology will soon be dominated by discussions of systems in which evolution is ongoing, directional and in many cases non-reversing because environments are changed so substantially.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

RELATIONS BETWEEN SPECIES. “The eco-evolutionary dynamics of interspecific interactions may strongly influence community dynamics, food web structure and ecosystem function. Some of the best examples here come from interactions between hosts and pathogens in introduced species.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

STRAIN GENE VARIATION. ““As the numbers of sequenced E. coli strains continues to grow, the number of discovered core genes remains about the same, while the number of flex genes grows linearly with the number of strains sequenced. Land et al., asserted that comparison of more than 2000 Escherichia coli genomes finds an E. coli core genome of about 3100 gene families and a total of about 89,000 gene families.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

INVISIBLE UNCULTURABLES. “Historically, far more cells have been seen by direct observation than could not be enticed to develop into colonies. Measurements of the ratio of culturable to actual cells range from 10(-2) to 10(-8), indicating that the vast majority of environmental prokaryotic cells cannot be studied in the laboratory, rendering them—until now—effectively invisible to science.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn