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EMERGING PHAGOSPHERE. "This view reveals substantial diversity even among phages known to infect a common host strain, but the relationships are complex, with mosaic genomic architectures generated by illegitimate recombination over a long period of evolutionary history." A promiscuous bunch. http://jvi.asm.org/content/89/16/8107.short View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGICAL MYTHS. “A compound hypothesis positing that self-fertilization is an evolutionary dead end conflates two distinct claims: the transition from outcrossing to selfing is unidirectional; and the diversification rate, or the balance of the speciation and extinction rate, is negative for selfing species. Both claims have enjoyed widespread informal support for decades, but have recently come under suspicion.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12182/full View in LinkedIn

"BACTERIOPHAGES are the most abundant biological entities in the biosphere, and this dynamic and old population is, not surprisingly, highly diverse genetically. Relative to bacterial genomics, phage genomics has advanced slowly, and a higher-resolution picture of the phagosphere is only just emerging." Bacteriophages are viruses that prey on bacteria. https://lnkd.in/dWD3NUK View in LinkedIn

COMBINED SEXES. “The vast majority of flowering plants are hermaphrodites, bearing both ovules and pollen enclosed in the same flower. They display an impressive diversity in form and function, with substantial variation within and across species in the degree to which self-fertilization is avoided or embraced.” https://lnkd.in/dj9hK7n View in LinkedIn

BACTERIAL IGNORANCE. "The earth contains enormous microbial diversity. Microbes colonize a wide variety of environmental niches, creating complex ecosystems and communities. Despite the marvelous progress in microbiology over the past century, we have only scratched the surface of this microbial world. It has been estimated that

BAD SELFING GENETICS. "The ephemeral nature of selfing lineages may be primarily due to the accumulation of deleterious mutations. Also, a reduced rate of fixation of beneficial mutations can limit the ability of selfing populations to adapt to changing environments." https://lnkd.in/dX-FzGD View in LinkedIn

MICROBIAL MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. "It is now widely recognized that interconnected microbial communities drive matter and energy transformations in natural and engineered ecosystems, while also contributing to health and disease states in multicellular hosts." https://lnkd.in/dF2zqrE View in LinkedIn

IF A MARTIAN were to ask humans whether they had a comprehensive catalog of the creatures living on planet earth, the answer would be that we know much less than 1% of those inhabitants. This staggering ignorance of the most dominant destructive species on the planet speaks for itself. We instead invest our considerable resources in warfare and conflict. View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE contemplates a part of biological dark matter. Dark matter in biology includes the large portion of the genome of unknown function ("junk DNA") which was of ancient retroviral origin; the second dark matter in biology, and the subject of this essay, is that of the enormous amount of external genetic material that we know nothing about, supposedly viral or bacteriophage in origin. We do not need to explore other planets to find new frontiers. Our own is full of uncharted territory. View in LinkedIn

ASSUMPTIONS. “Throughout this article, we have drawn attention to areas of research needed to evaluate the two interdependent components of Stebbins’ SEDE hypothesis in flowering plants: the transition rate from selfing to outcrossing is zero; and self-fertilization is associated with a negative diversification rate.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12182/full View in LinkedIn