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TRANSCRIPTS ARE KEY. “As gene expression analysis continues the transition to high-throughput sequencing, transcripts rather than genes become the fundamental feature measured and will require the update of functional profiling methods to support transcript-level functional analyses of enrichment.” https://bmcsystbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1752-0509-8-S2-S1 View in LinkedIn

ARBITRARY FUNCTIONAL ASSIGNMENTS. “The assignment of genes to functions is still a largely unfinished task and the boundaries of pathway definitions are arbitrary: one database might include a set of genes within a specific signaling pathway while another would split this into two separate pathways.” https://bmcsystbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1752-0509-8-S2-S1 View in LinkedIn

"BIOLOGICAL IMMORTALITY refers to a stable or decreasing rate of mortality from senescence, thus decoupling it from chronological age. Various unicellular and multicellular species, including some vertebrates, achieve this state either throughout their existence or after living long enough. A biologically immortal living being can still die from means other than senescence, such as through injury or disease. The term is also used by biologists to describe cells that are not subject to the Hayflick limit." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality View in LinkedIn

TIME IN PHYSICS. “Physics is the only science that explicitly studies time, but even physicists agree that time is one of the most difficult properties of our universe to understand.” https://lnkd.in/dn7qBvV View in LinkedIn

MUDDY TERMS. "Normal cultured cell populations are mortal but cells that are immortal are abnormal and most have properties of cancer cells. Nevertheless, this distinction becomes blurred because the terms ‘mortality’ and ‘immortality’ are subject to enormous variations in understanding." (Leonard Hayflick). https://lnkd.in/esfPTAR View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues this final weekend from last weekend on the subject of biological time, which has been largely ignored in the literature. Time, it seems, scales with both size and complexity; and as complexity increases in biological systems, time plays a critical role in the coordination and intermeshing of numerous processes, in coordination with space, and in this, reflects that biology is centered, like physics, on both time and space, whether we appreciate it or not. View in LinkedIn

REGARDLESS OF MOLECULAR TURNOVER. "In its simplest, though still inaccurate form, biological mortality is usually defined as the death of an organism or the termination of its lineage. Immortality would be defined as the indefinite survival of a single organism or of a replicating population regardless of molecular turnover. Imperfect as these definitions are, they do have limited use in understanding some of the fundamental differences between normal and cancer cells." (Leonard Hayflick). https://lnkd.in/esfPTAR View in LinkedIn

A MATTER OF SCALE. "Humans as individuals are mortal but humans as a population are immortal. That concept applies equally well to all animals and most plants. We frequently see it stated that bacteria and protozoa are immortal. That is not so. Like human populations, unicellular populations are immortal and like individual humans unicellular organisms are mortal." http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v62/full/62111380.html View in LinkedIn

DEFINITION OF BIOLOGICAL IMMORTALITY has been, not unexpectedly, a bone of contention among the quarrelsome and long-eared thinkers in biology. At times, getting biologists to agree on anything appears to be a task worthy of Sisyphus. View in LinkedIn

A MATTER OF SCALE. "Humans as individuals are mortal but humans as a population are immortal. That concept applies equally well to all animals and most plants. We frequently see it stated that bacteria and protozoa are immortal. That is not so. Like human populations, unicellular populations are immortal and like individual humans unicellular organisms are mortal." http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v62/full/62111380.html View in LinkedIn