Year: 2022

INDEPENDENT CONFIRMATION. "Other findings suggest that E. coli has the potential to evolve a Cit+ phenotype. Hall reported the only documented case of a spontaneous Cit+ mutant in E. coli." http://www.pnas.org/content/105/23/7899.full View in LinkedIn

HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY. "More generally, we suggest that historical contingency is especially important when it facilitates the evolution of key innovations that are not easily evolved by gradual, cumulative selection." http://www.pnas.org/content/105/23/7899.full View in LinkedIn

RANDOM VS DETERMINISTIC EVOLUTION. "At its core, evolution involves a profound tension between random and deterministic processes. Natural selection works systematically to adapt populations to their prevailing environments. However, selection requires heritable variation generated by random mutation, and even beneficial mutations may be lost by random drift. Moreover, random and deterministic processes become intertwined over time such that future alternatives may be contingent on the prior history of an evolving population." http://www.pnas.org/content/105/23/7899.full View in LinkedIn

ACCIDENTS OF HISTORY. "For example, multiple beneficial mutations will arise in some unpredictable order, and those that are substituted first may differ from others in their pleiotropic effects and epistatic interactions, thus constraining some evolutionary paths while potentiating other outcomes. These accidents of history may even determine the survival or extinction of entire lineages, given the capricious and sudden nature of some environmental changes." http://www.pnas.org/content/105/23/7899.full View in LinkedIn

LARGE DOWNSTREAM IMPACTS. "Although each change on an evolutionary path has some causal relation to the circumstances in which it arose, outcomes must eventually depend on the details of long chains of antecedent states, small changes in which may have enormous long-term repercussions." http://www.pnas.org/content/105/23/7899.full View in LinkedIn

THE BIGGEST GAP. "The gap between eukaryotes and prokaryotes is recognized as the most profound evolutionary discontinuity in the living world. This gap is reflected in the fossil record." https://lnkd.in/d-J5JBr View in LinkedIn

GENETIC COMPARTMENTALIZATION. "During evolution, the genomes of eukaryotic cells have undergone major restructuring to meet the new regulatory challenges associated with compartmentalization of the genetic material in the nucleus and the organelles acquired by endosymbiosis (mitochondria and plastids)." https://lnkd.in/d7Gtrg9 View in LinkedIn

GENOME RESTRUCTURING. "Restructuring involved the loss of dispensable or redundant genes and the massive translocation of genes from the ancestral organelles to the nucleus. Genomics and bioinformatic data suggest that the process of DNA transfer from organelles to the nucleus still continues, providing raw material for evolutionary tinkering in the nuclear genome." https://lnkd.in/d7Gtrg9 View in LinkedIn

BOTHERSOME ISSUE. "If eukaryotes are so richly favoured, why did they only evolve once?" https://lnkd.in/dNEtvR8 View in LinkedIn

NO SURVIVING INTERMEDIATES. "Regardless of how early eukaryotes escaped from their predicament, it is plain that the problems faced by a prokaryotic host cell with bacterial endosymbionts are serious, if not irreconcilable, and go a long way towards explaining why there are no surviving evolutionary intermediates between prokaryotes and eukaryotes." https://lnkd.in/dNEtvR8 View in LinkedIn