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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses for the next two weekends on pine tree seasonal adaptations. I live among Mediterranean pine trees and observe a significant sequence of annual events: winter pine cone drops, spring -- yellow pollen coating everything, followed by enormous flower drops and two sets of old needle falls, along with the emergence of a new crop of cones in the crowns. The leaf whorl senescence is clearly hierarchical, dropping needles distally. A very busy creature. View in LinkedIn

RADICAL CHANGES. "Today we know that it was a strong infection event with persistent viral settlers that transferred complete genetic blocks into single, or a very few infection events to host organisms that changed the phenotypic organism in a radical way without an infinite number of small steps." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12570/abstract View in LinkedIn

LARGE ENZYME BOOST. "Antioxidant metabolites in eastern white pine (Pinus strobus L.) needles increased two- to fourfold from the summer to the winter season. Antioxidant enzymes in needle tissue increased between 2 and 122 fold during this same period." https://lnkd.in/eqkRiKP View in LinkedIn

PLACENTAL NOVELTY. "If we were to investigate the evolutionary novelty of placental mammals, we would have to explain a rather complex genotype, the syncitin complex, by randomly derived replication errors. However, generation, integration, and regulation of the placenta are not a stepwise process, and missing links have not yet been found." https://lnkd.in/bpZMBAH View in LinkedIn

SCAVENGING TOXIC RADICALS. "Some cold-hardened species demonstrate a resistance to photoinhibition that may result from increased metabolism of active oxygen scavengers. Cold acclimatization has been associated with increased levels of ascorbate, ascorbate peroxidase, dehydroascorbate reductase, ascorbate free radical reductase, glutathione, glutathione reductase, and superoxide dismutase." https://lnkd.in/eqkRiKP View in LinkedIn

PERSISTENT VIRUSES. "Several capabilities of the eukaryotic nucleus show features common to large DNA viruses and cannot be found in any cellular organism, which may indicate that the symbiogenesis of eukaryotes additionally depended on a persistent virus as its nucleus and maybe even its nucleolus." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12570/abstract View in LinkedIn

DAMPING THE MACHINE. "Cold-acclimated conifer species such as Pinus sylvestris and Picea abies undergo a decrease in the efficiency of PSII (photoinhibition), which is assumed to provide a mechanism for thermal and radiative dissipation of excess excitation energy of the photosynthetic apparatus." https://lnkd.in/eqkRiKP View in LinkedIn

TWO BRANCHES. "Eukaryotic genes that participate in information processing (translation, transcription, etc.) show a close relationship to eubacteria. On the other side, genetic factors that control metabolic processes more closely resemble the metabolic processes of archaea." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12570/abstract View in LinkedIn

NOT BY MUTATIONS. "The syncytic gene complex was transferred via a persistent retroviral infection event and not by mutations of previously available genetic sequences." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12570/abstract View in LinkedIn

AVOIDING FETAL REJECTION. "The syncytin genotype enables the mother organism's immune system not to detect the embryonal genotype, which has some non-self genetic identities. The mother's immune system, therefore, cannot reject the embryo until a certain stage of development." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12570/abstract View in LinkedIn