Year: 2022

CO-EVOLUTION. "DNA, RNA and proteins are major biological macromolecules that coevolve and adapt to environments as components of one highly interconnected system." https://lnkd.in/d7UdfWB View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL CONSEQUENCE. "Eukaryotic transcription is inherently noisy." When a completely foreign metabolic pathway is bolted-on, no surprise. https://lnkd.in/eT5V5Xc View in LinkedIn

EFFICIENCY FALSEHOOD. "There is no reason to believe that unicellular protists with large genomes regulate the expression of their genes more efficiently or with greater flexibility than do prokaryotes with much less DNA." https://lnkd.in/d6GwkCt http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

EFFICIENCY IN SIMPLICITY. "In fact, because of their more rapid generation times and larger population sizes, we might expect prokaryotes to have more exquisitely refined regulatory systems, more selection per base pair as it were—a sort of historical complexity, alluded to above in our cyanobacteria vs. marsupial comparison." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

EXAPTATION OF NON-CODING DNA. "We are left then with the evolutionary potential of excess eukaryotic DNA and its ability to be co-opted into function, which might well impart a different tempo and mode to eukaryotic evolution." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

WHAT ABOUT VESTIGIAL GENETICS, hangovers from early gene exaptations and promiscuous gene sharing? How do these affect evolutionary potential? View in LinkedIn

GENE FATES AFTER DUPLICATION. "Following duplication, each gene within a paralogous pair may evolve in several ways. For example, it may retain the same set of functions as the ancestral copy, retain only a subset of the original set of functions (subfunctionalization), obtain a new function (neofunctionalization), or degrade into a nonfunctional gene (nonfunctionalization)." https://lnkd.in/eHCDVhZ View in LinkedIn

EXAPTATION. "Notably, the processes of subfunctionalization and neofunctionalization may not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, the degenerative processes leading to subfunctionalization may act upon silencer elements and thereby promote neofunctionalization." https://lnkd.in/eHCDVhZ View in LinkedIn

PSEUDOGENES. "The human genome is also home to a large number of pseudogenes. Estimates of the total number range from 12,600 to 19,700." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

BROKEN GENES. "Other historical markers can be found in our genes. We have a gene to make Vitamin C but, unfortunately for those sailors who died from scurvy, it is broken, so we have to get Vitamin C from our food. Chimpanzees and orangutans have the same broken gene, which can only have been inherited from our common ancestor for whom it was functional, as it still is for many animals." https://lnkd.in/d8JdtZG View in LinkedIn