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TWO GENE BUFFER. "It has long been appreciated that there is a limit to the number of deleterious mutations that an organism can sustain per generation. The presence of these mutations is usually not harmful, because diploid organisms generally require only one functional copy of any given gene." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

SHIMMERING BACKDROP. "Like life, death is a facet of underlying continuity, endlessly moving and evolving." https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/275814 View in LinkedIn

GENETIC DRIFT. "We are promoting the idea that the power of random genetic drift imposes a lower bound to the degree to which natural selection can reduce the mutation rate. This drift-barrier hypothesis seems to support a number of previously disconnected observations, including the increase in the mutation rate with reductions in effective population size, the magnified error rates associated with DNA polymerases and repair enzymes used only infrequently in replication, and the extraordinarily high rates of base misincorporation into transcripts." https://biodesign.asu.edu/mechanisms-evolution/research View in LinkedIn

FITNESS NOT ACTING ON DEATH. "Likewise, death seemed incapable of evolving, since it did not contribute to the fitness of the individual, and genes would not, therefore, determine death." https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/275813 View in LinkedIn

MISSING REFERENCE. https://lnkd.in/dnzRdnG View in LinkedIn

NET BALANCE. "The genes apparently have been lost in a stepwise manner, with substantial loss associated with each internal branch of the tree and most but not all of the individual species. These losses were only to a small extent offset by inferred gain of new genes." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

STREAMLINING EXEMPLAR. "One of the best-characterized cases involves the Lactobacillales, a group of Gram-positive bacteria that is extremely common in a variety of animal- and plant-associated habitats. A maximum parsimony reconstruction revealed substantial gene loss, from ∼3,000 genes in the common ancestor of Bacilli to ∼1,300–1,800 genes in various Lactobacilli species." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

OUTSOURCING LIFESTYLES. "Beyond parasites and symbionts, reductive evolution was observed in several groups of organisms that evolved a commensal life style." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

EXTREME GENOMICS. "Deep genome reduction, with the smallest sequenced genome of only 2.9 Mb, is also observed in Microsporidia, the eukaryotic intracellular parasites that appear to be highly derived fungi. The most extreme genome reduction among eukaryotes is observed in nucleomorphs which are remnants of algal endosymbionts present in cryptophytes and chlorarachniophytes and retain only a few hundred genes." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

EVIDENCE-BASED. "Genomic complexity is far easier to quantify than phenotypic complexity (even if the latter is easier to recognize intuitively). Indeed, the remarkable progress of genome sequencing, combined with the development of computational methods for advanced comparative genomics, provides for increasingly reliable reconstruction of ancestral genomes which transforms the study of the evolution of complexity from being a speculative exercise to becoming an evidence-based research direction." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn