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PROTEIN FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY. "Moonlighting has since been demonstrated for a variety of glycolytic, TCA cycle, and other metabolic enzymes. It is now clear that moonlighting represents an important source of protein diversity in multicellular eukaryotes and is relevant for certain human diseases." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

UNDIRECTED EVOLUTION. "Amoeba draws its inspiration from the 'Tierra' simulator developed by artificial life researcher Thomas Ray, but with one crucial difference: in Tierra, life-forms must be manually introduced into the soup; in Amoeba, the soup is seeded with random instructions, and life-forms spontaneously appear, as if by magic." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

MOONLIGHTING FUNCTIONS. "Certain members of the ATP-grasp and cupin superfamilies lack (known) enzymatic activities and act solely as ATP-binding (synapsin), auxin-binding, or seed storage proteins. Many enzymes acquire such additional (typically non-enzymatic) functions even without the loss of their catalytic activity. This phenomenon, referred to as “moonlighting", is usually observed when the respective genes are expressed in atypical environments (tissue, cell organelle, or secreted)." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

AMOEBA. "Although developing software by self-replication, evolution and natural selection sounds like science fiction, Amoeba has already demonstrated the remarkable fact that in the digital world, order can indeed arise out of chaos. Ironic, perhaps, when our experience with today's software is often quite the reverse." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

METABOLIC PLASTICITY. "It has been shown that many key biochemical steps can be catalyzed by two or more diverse, often unrelated enzyme forms, a phenomenon known as non-orthologous gene displacement." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

UNRELATED PLAYERS. "Comparative genomics revealed a surprising flexibility of the key metabolic pathways, including numerous biochemical reactions catalyzed by highly diverged or previously uncharacterized enzyme forms." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

WHY SO COMPLEX? "Metabolic pathways may seem arbitrary and unnecessarily complex. In many cases, a chemist might devise a simpler route for the biochemical transformation, so why has nature chosen such complex solutions?" https://lnkd.in/dvz872D View in LinkedIn

LATENT POTENTIAL. "We show that when we require such networks to be viable on one particular carbon source, they are typically also viable on multiple other carbon sources that were not targets of selection. For example, viability on glucose may entail viability on up to 44 other sole carbon sources. Any one adaptation in these metabolic systems typically entails multiple potential exaptations. Metabolic systems thus contain a latent potential for evolutionary innovations with non-adaptive origins." https://lnkd.in/dqbbJy3 View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTIONARY INNOVATIONS. "Some evolutionary innovations may originate non-adaptively as exaptations, or pre-adaptations, which are by-products of other adaptive traits. Examples include feathers, which originated before they were used in flight, and lens crystallins, which are light-refracting proteins that originated as enzymes." https://lnkd.in/dqbbJy3 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for the next two weekends considers the evolution of metabolic pathways. A functional cellular metabolism is arguably the test of whether genetics is actually working. And cellular metabolism has turned out to be remarkably intricate and complex. It is hard to imagine how this evolved by trial-and-error adaptations, even given aeons of time. But redundancies and futile cycles give some clues about its chaotic construction. View in LinkedIn