Month: September 2022

CO-EVOLUTION. "There are many animal polyomaviruses, and polyomavirus infection is highly species specific. This suggests prolonged coevolution of humans with at least five different polyomaviruses. Similarly, the eight known human herpesviruses are extremely efficient at establishing chronic infections; most of us carry many herpesviruses for our entire lives." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867409007831 View in LinkedIn

NEW PASSENGERS. "New polyomaviruses are not our only recently recognized passengers. Anelloviruses and related viruses, as well as adeno-associated virus (AAV), are now recognized to infect most humans by the end of childhood." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867409007831 View in LinkedIn

GREAT UNKNOWN. "We predict that the advent of high-throughput genome sequencing will significantly increase the number of known human viruses and the number of viruses that contribute to our metagenome via the establishment of chronic infection." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867409007831 View in LinkedIn

UNDER THE BUGSCOPE. "Viruses have evolved highly effective strategies for establishing chronic infection despite the presence of an active host antiviral immune response. Thus, they should be viewed as highly sophisticated molecular machines that have been “studying” us far longer than we have been studying them." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867409007831 View in LinkedIn

VIRAL ORIGINS. "Viruses may have arisen from mobile genetic elements that gained the ability to move between cells. They may be descendants of previously free-living organisms that adapted a parasitic replication strategy. Perhaps viruses existed before, and led to the evolution of, cellular life." http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origins-of-viruses-14398218 View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR REPLICATION. Prions give credibility to the idea that viruses arose from self-replicating molecules. Molecules interacting with other molecules carrying information sufficient to ensure duplication by whatever means. View in LinkedIn

PRE-DNA WORLD. "Since viruses with RNA genomes are the only living beings that use RNA as a storage medium, they are considered to be witnesses of an earlier RNA-world, of a time when DNA did not exist yet." https://lnkd.in/e-pJFM6 View in LinkedIn

ANCIENT LIFE FORMS. "Negatively stranded RNA viruses have genome structures and replication patterns that are dissimilar to all known cell types. As demonstrated by phylogenetic analyses, cellular replicases are related to each other; however, there is no similarity between RNA-viral replicases and those of any known cell types." https://lnkd.in/e-pJFM6 View in LinkedIn

RNA TO DNA. "The transition from the RNA to the DNA world was a major event in the history of life. The invention of DNA required the appearance of enzymatic activities for both synthesis of DNA precursors, retro-transcription of RNA templates and replication of single and double-stranded DNA molecules...DNA can be considered as a modified form of RNA." https://lnkd.in/dNTbYMw View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses on a brilliant article by Chelsea D Specht, from Professor of Plant Biology at Berkeley, considering evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) approaches to flower form adaptation. "In 1977, a revolution in thinking about evolution and developmental biology began, with the arrival of recombinant DNA technology in genetics, and the papers Ontogeny and Phylogeny by Stephen J. Gould and Evolution by Tinkering by François Jacob." This is the mature flowering of that line of thinking. https://lnkd.in/dFhPQGP View in LinkedIn