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THE GREY ZONE of life includes viruses, prions, transposable elements (jumping genes) and of course, the evolution of life from non-life. This represents the transition from chemistry to biology and everything in between. View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this last section on plant dormancy phenomena and mechanisms. Our understanding of plants remains quite rudimentary, despite the genetic and biochemical tools available today, and huge questions still remain unresolved. But we only invented printing 500 years ago, so we are just at the beginning. View in LinkedIn

DORMANCY AS A MERISTEM STATE. "We reconsider seasonal cycles of growth and dormancy in view of a new definition of dormancy as a state within the meristem, together with recent exciting developments in the study of perennials, particularly the identification of common signalling intermediates between flowering time and growth cessation in trees." https://lnkd.in/dgbUNyw View in LinkedIn

GROWTH-DORMANCY CYCLE. "A key feature of the perennial life style in plants is the ability to cease meristem activity and to establish a dormant state in which the meristem is rendered insensitive to growth-promoting signals for some time before it is released and can resume growth. The seasonal cycling between growth and dormancy has received little attention despite its importance for perennial behaviour." https://lnkd.in/dgbUNyw View in LinkedIn

SPONTANEOUS MUTANTS. "But mutants can arise out of the blue too. Even if a population consists entirely of the same strain (which you can set up through cloning), resistant or sensitive mutants develop spontaneously in a very short span of time. Prions, it seems, are very quick to adapt." https://lnkd.in/dVZWBhV View in LinkedIn

PIECES OF THE CLOCK. "The seasonality of bud dormancy with undefined repeated cycles of growth–dormancy along the life of an individual, the major role of hormones such as ABA, and the occurrence of dormancy-related processes on preformed flowers located within buds instead of vegetative tissues, among other particularities, suggest the existence of yet unknown exciting pieces in the “clock.”." https://lnkd.in/duD22Cw View in LinkedIn

ADAPTED STRAINS. "Li found that prions taken from brain tissue are different to those grown in cells cultured in a laboratory. The brain-adapted prions are capable of infected nerve tissue and they’re resistant to a drug called swainsonine (swa) that completely blocks the growth of other strains. The cell-adapted prions lack both these abilities but they’re better at growing in cell cultures." https://lnkd.in/dVZWBhV View in LinkedIn

EXPANSIVE FRONTIER. "The rich literature describing vernalization in model plants may radically accelerate the knowledge of the epigenetics of bud dormancy regulation over the next few years, but it will require the implementation of more informative biochemical and functional approaches in perennial species to complement previous genetic and genomic studies." https://lnkd.in/duD22Cw View in LinkedIn

QUASI-ALIVE. "The remarkable finding that prions can mutate and adapt to their environment imbues them with a further attribute of living things, without however elevating them to the status of being ‘alive’." https://lnkd.in/dVZWBhV View in LinkedIn

EPIGENETIC SIGNALS. "As new details of the epigenetic regulation of gene expression during bud dormancy processes emerge, its mechanistic similarities with the well-known regulation of Arabidopsis FLC gene are becoming increasingly evident." https://lnkd.in/duD22Cw View in LinkedIn