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STREAMLINING AND OUTSOURCING. Extreme genome reduction in symbiotic bacteria. https://lnkd.in/dx2k-vt View in LinkedIn

AMPLIFIED. "I realized that the global network is just a loosely connected parallel computer, and much larger and more powerful than anything that will ever exist as a single machine." And thus was born Ray's plan to colonize the Net." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

BEYOND THE ONION. "Importantly, the comparison is not restricted to onions versus humans. It could as easily be between pufferfish and lungfish, which differ by ∼350-fold, or members of the genus Allium, which have more than a 4-fold range in genome size that is not the result of polyploidy." https://lnkd.in/eT5V5Xc View in LinkedIn

INNOVATIVE SURVIVAL. "The swift and drastic size reductions of those first runs startled Ray, but even more remarkable were the survival strategies these variants encoded. The 45- and 51-byte creatures, it turned out, were not worms but bona fide parasitic viruses, achieving their leanness by borrowing reproductive code from larger programs when they needed to copy themselves." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

THE ONION QUESTION. "Why does an onion require five times more of it (the genome) than a human?” https://lnkd.in/eT5V5Xc View in LinkedIn

LET FREE. "Once loosed into the Tierra environment installed on Ray's laptop, the creature's offspring quickly spread to the new world's every corner, within minutes displaying the evolutionary transformations that would "write" Ray's organisms from then on." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

NOT A SIMPLE CORRELATION. "The relationship between genomic complexity and the complexity at various levels of the phenotype, from molecular to organismal, is far from being straightforward as it has become clear already in the pre-genomic era." Some relatively simple creatures have much greater genomic complexity than more complex creatures. https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

THE START. "Primed to carry out the requisite natural selections, Ray's digital ecosphere was nearly complete. He called it Tierra (Spanish for "earth") and started preparing the final touch: an inhabitant. Later dubbed "the Ancestor," it was the first worm Tom Ray ever created – an 80-byte-long self-replicating machine written in Tierra's quirky assembly language – and as it happens, it was also the last." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

GENOME COMPLEXITY ISSUES. "Despite recent developments in genomics it remains unclear why gene content, chromosome number, and genome size vary independently of each other. Is there a tendency for genome size or chromosome number to increase or decrease over time? Does genome size or chromosome number have an adaptive value and, if so, what is that value?" https://lnkd.in/dsqiJD5 View in LinkedIn

INCREASING GENOMIC COMPLEXITY. "Complete genomic sequences from diverse phylogenetic lineages reveal notable increases in genome complexity from prokaryotes to multicellular eukaryotes. The changes include gradual increases in gene number, resulting from the retention of duplicate genes, and more abrupt increases in the abundance of spliceosomal introns and mobile genetic elements." https://lnkd.in/dsqiJD5 View in LinkedIn