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The carpel singlehandedly contributed to the huge success of flowering plants (angiosperms) by protecting the female reproductive parts of plants as opposed to gymnosperms which had open systems. View in LinkedIn

Dead nettle in its spring glory. View in LinkedIn

LEAP FORWARD. “The carpel, or female reproductive organ enclosing the ovules, is one of the major evolutionary innovations of the flowering plants. The carpel was undoubtedly a major factor in the evolutionary success of the angiosperms, which diversified from a common ancestor that is estimated to have lived in the Late Jurassic period, around 160 million years ago (MYA), to form approximately 300 000 species alive today.” https://lnkd.in/dA_5ryA View in LinkedIn

BLACK BOX. “Our goal is to know the function of every gene so we can develop a complete model of how a cell works. But that goal has not been reached yet. Of the seven genes added to this organism for normal cell division, scientists know what only two of them do. The roles that the other five play in cell division are not yet known.” Craig Venter team scores again with a minimal cell. https://lnkd.in/d-m72ta View in LinkedIn

POTENTIAL HUGENESS. “The existence of wandering IMBHs in high-mass galaxies will create a reservoir of IMBH-SMBH mergers waiting to happen. While some IMBHs will have dynamical friction timescales longer than a Hubble time, others will have orbits that decay and bring them into the centers of their hosts.” (IMBHs = intermediate mass black holes; SMBH = supermassive black holes). https://lnkd.in/dYX7TQV View in LinkedIn

METABOLIC SAMPLE. “The resulting scope of this seed set consists of a fully connected network of 315 reactions and 260 metabolites, the composition of which is robust to variations of the seed set compounds.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

SEED SET. “Importantly, the set of seed molecules we defined contains simple carboxylic acids in the form of acetate and formate, which could be provided by either an abiotic mechanism or a primitive pathway for carbon fixation (e.g., a primitive variant of the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway or the reductive TCA cycle.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

GENE ORIGINS? “This network could have enabled the synthesis of a diverse set of (bio)chemical compounds, providing precursors for the subsequent rise of informational nucleic acid polymers. Whether and how such a primordial system could have been endowed with features essential for cellular life as we know it, such as collective autocatalysis and information processing, remains an open question.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

PRE-GENETICS. “The properties of the core phosphate-free network suggest that a thioester-based protometabolism may have started from a few, simple geochemically abundant molecules, and expanded to a surprisingly rich and diverse biochemistry, potentially a network-level “fossil” of biosphere metabolism, even prior to the appearance of the phosphate based genetic coding system.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

BRIDGE TO THE PRESENT. “While we cannot rule out possible alternative interpretations of our findings, such as a gradually evolved reliance on metabolic routes that make minimal use of phosphate, it is interesting to ask whether our result could help bridge a fundamental gap between geochemistry and biochemistry.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn