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VIRAL RESISTANCE. "We have come to recently realize that viruses are omnipresent so all life must survive in its virosphere habitat. And such survival often involves virus themselves since virus, their defective and various other genetic parasites (mostly called transposons) can and often do provide virus resistance systems." https://lnkd.in/etdQ9rN View in LinkedIn

HUMAN GENOME RELICS. “Most of the junk consists of: (1) very obvious examples of broken genes (pseudogenes 5%); (2) bits and pieces of transposon sequences that used to be capable of transposing but have mutated over time (45%); and (3) ancient viral sequences that have degenerated (9%). That's 59% of the genome that's clearly junk DNA. In addition, there's plenty of evidence that most intron sequences are dispensable. That accounts for another 28% of the genome. The total amount of junk DNA is at least 87%.“ https://lnkd.in/d2xZtXk View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend on the positive impact of viruses on life on this planet. For a very long time, viruses have only been associated with diseases, and little else was known about them. But few are pathogenic, and the rest have played either benign or astonishingly advantageous roles during evolution. We still have a long way to go in understanding them. Just look at the composition of our own genomes, replete with viral footprints. What does this mean? View in LinkedIn

ROLE OF VIRAL JUMPING GENES. “Furthermore, transposable element activity can mediate genomic rearrangements, which may be regulated by epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation and histone modification.” https://lnkd.in/eC8eb-V View in LinkedIn

TWO CANDIDATE MECHANISMS. “Although the underlying mechanisms remain unknown, candidate mechanisms can be assigned, as genome integrity depends on the repair of double strand DNA breaks and mitotic and meiotic recombination, complex processes that are highly linked.” https://lnkd.in/eC8eb-V View in LinkedIn

NEW VIEWPOINT. “We postulate that genomic rearrangements are a driver of adaptation in organisms that are not engaged in conventional sex.” https://lnkd.in/eC8eb-V View in LinkedIn

HUGE IMPACT. "Since persistence is always regulated, it is a mostly silent state in which reactivation is tightly linked to host (reproductive) biology with big consequences to host and virus fitness." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apm.12485/full View in LinkedIn

ASSUMPTION BUSTING. “With these alternative modes of reproduction in mind, one can wonder whether genuinely asexual, and truly clonal, fungal species really exist.” https://lnkd.in/eC8eb-V View in LinkedIn

HYBRID BEINGS. "Establishing persistence is difficult and can be thought of as resulting from a successful hacking of host identity networks to insert new code and promote survival of a new more complex virus–host identity." Read and re-read carefully. https://lnkd.in/etdQ9rN View in LinkedIn

ANCIENT LINKAGE. “Unisexual reproduction frequently generates aneuploidy, which can be linked to phenotypic changes and drives adaptation. Interestingly, it has recently been hypothesized that unisexual reproduction may even be the original ancestral form of sexual reproduction to which sexes have evolved later.” https://lnkd.in/eC8eb-V View in LinkedIn