Category: Uncategorized

ANTIBIOTIC GENE JUMPING. "The movement of a transgene from plant to microbe could pose a significant risk, especially if an antibiotic resistance gene, originally from a bacterium, could be transferred to a pathogenic bacterium, causing new antibiotic resistance problems for human health." http://www.isb.vt.edu/articles/oct0501.htm View in LinkedIn

IN ONLY 71 YEARS, we have so misused a lifesaving class of antibiotic molecules that they are almost unusable, and have so disincentivized innovators that the pipeline is dry. We have only ourselves to blame. View in LinkedIn

WE WERE WARNED. "The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant." (Sir Alexander Fleming, Nobel Lecture, 1945). https://lnkd.in/eEaXmjy View in LinkedIn

ANOTHER CONTEMPORARY QUAGMIRE of horizontal gene transfer consequences is the crisis of antibiotic resistance. All along, we knew that this would happen, we saw it emerge, we left permissive laws in place allowing 80% of antibiotics to go into fattening livestock, and then, on the brink of disaster, we cry foul. View in LinkedIn

NEW MAD COW VARIANT. "Recently, it has been demonstrated that a vast number of BSE prion-carrying, symptom-free cattle may have been consumed, and at the moment the extent of nv CJD is impossible to forecast." A ticking time bomb, with no doubt. Remember the politicians eating hamburgers on TV declaring their safety after the infamous Bush meat testing ban "testing is not scientific")? https://lnkd.in/eJ8cwgX View in LinkedIn

MAD COW. "Another striking example is represented by the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathia) story. Against the explicit conclusions of experts, the BSE prions crossed the hypothesised “species” barrier and initiated new variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (nv CJD) in human beings." A contemporary example of prion expansion. https://lnkd.in/eJ8cwgX View in LinkedIn

DOUBLE EVOLUTION. "A single protein sequence can be the basis for many prion strains/variants, with different biological properties based on different amyloid conformations, each rather stably propagating. Prions are unique in that evolution and selection work at both the level of the chromosomal gene encoding the protein, and on the prion itself selecting prion variants." https://lnkd.in/eyBEuC7 View in LinkedIn

"YEAST PRIONS: Paramutation at the protein level? Prionogenesis can confer both loss-of-function and gain-of-function properties to the prion protein and this in turn can have a major impact on host phenotype, short-term adaptation and evolution of new traits." https://lnkd.in/eyrvJwi View in LinkedIn

PARAMUTATION. "In epigenetics, a paramutation is an interaction between two alleles at a single locus, whereby one allele induces a heritable change in the other allele. This change is meiotically inheritable, and therefore paramutation violates Mendel’s first law." https://lnkd.in/eTKtQvg View in LinkedIn

VAST GENE LOSSES. "It has been well known for decades that the evolution of numerous parasitic and symbiotic organisms entails simplification rather than complexification. In particular, bacteria that evolve from free-living forms to obligate intracellular parasites can lose up to 95% of their gene repertoires without compromising the ancestral set of highly conserved genes involved in core cellular functions." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn