Month: September 2022

SYNTHETIC BUGS. "All the key barriers to the artificial synthesis of viruses and bacteria have been overcome. Einstein's revolutionary theories helped unravel the secrets of the cosmos. They also led to the atom bomb." http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

PROGRAMMING LIFE. "In five years time, we will be programming bacterial cells in the computer and compiling and storing its program into these new cells so they can readily execute them.” https://lnkd.in/dSKGWDR View in LinkedIn

SIMPLIFYING PROGRAMING OF E. COLI. "Currently, each time we need a cell that will perform a certain new function we have to recreate it from scratch which is a long and laborious process. Most people think all we have to do to modify behaviour is to modify a cell’s DNA but it’s not as simple as that — we usually find we get the wrong behaviour and then we are back to square one." (2011). http://www.tgdaily.com/trendwatch-features/59511-re-programmable-cells-to-create-new-life-forms View in LinkedIn

DNA AS SOFTWARE. "To do with biology what you would do if you were designing a piece of software." The immense change in our collective view of the natural world, and in such a brief time, is encapsulated in this remarkable sentence. http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/03/26/making-living-matter-programmable/ View in LinkedIn

THE END OF DARWINISM. "Gerald Joyce (Scripps Research Institute) frets that as the boundaries blur, biologists are now going to be directing evolution and that we are witnessing "the end of Darwinism." http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues and concludes from last weekend on the theme of viral quasispecies and mutant swarms. An astonishingly high mutation rate, that characterizes viral storms, comes at a cost to the virus, and generally this has been overlooked. This low fidelity reproduction requires the development of tolerance in the swarm, both of which have clinical ramifications. View in LinkedIn

SWARM REPLICATIVE ADVANTAGE. "Regarding complementation within mutant spectra, an initial observation was that fitness of biological viral clones was on average lower than fitness of the complete populations from which the clones were derived, indicating that the mutant ensemble had some replicative advantage over its individual components." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

EXTREME CASES. "Some extreme cases of complementation between variants generated during quasispecies evolution that can greatly alter viral population structure or function have been described." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR MEMORY. "There are additional observations that support the view that mutant spectra are true actors of evolutionary outcomes. Viral quasispecies can be endowed with a molecular memory consisting of minority genomes present at higher than basal frequency levels because the genomes had been dominant in a prior phase of evolution of the same lineage." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

MEMORY FITNESS ADVANTAGE. "This allows a viral population to respond more effectively to selective constraints that had already been experienced by the same virus lineage." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn