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SO ENDS this consideration of the genetic drivers of flower shape. This was a difficult topic but hopefully worth it. Animals and plants differ significantly in their construction and underlying genetics, and the rampant gene duplication in plants appears to give a vast range of options for natural selection to act upon and allow considerable phenotypic diversity to emerge. View in LinkedIn

SILENT DUPLICATION EFFECTS. "Mutations in the coding regions of genes involved in a regulatory network can cause changes in protein–protein interactions, but these interactions could occur in a restricted, tissue-specific manner and impact a subset of developmental functions. The presence of duplicated genes means that mutations and subsequent drift or natural selection affecting genes or their targets can occur without necessarily changing the essential function of an existing GRN." (GRN = gene regulatory networks). https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

NETWORK BUFFERING. "The same benefits of modularity that were evoked to hypothesize why cis-regulatory changes would be less pleiotropic than functional changes apply as well to the modularity of GRNs as effectors of gene regulation and expression, with the GRN acting as a buffer against any widespread negative effects of a coding mutation in a developmental gene." (GRN = gene regulatory networks). https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

SPARED BY REDUNDANCY. "Because of modularity in plant development and redundancy in GRNs underlying developmental processes, however, a change in a protein sequence may not have the massive negative pleotropic effects that were once considered to eliminate such changes from playing a role in developmental evolution." (GRN = gene regulatory networks). https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY MUTATIONS. "Unlike with functional mutations, regulatory mutations would not impact the physical interactions and function of the encoded protein, enabling essential metabolic or cellular functions to proceed." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

MORPHOLOGICAL GENE MUTATIONS. "Mutations in regulatory regions were thus thought to be the main force for morphological evolution, as changes in gene regulation impacting timing and/or position of gene expression were likely to be better tolerated as a result of their more subtle effects in a restricted set of tissues during development." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR PARASITES OF REPLICATORS. "It is likely that such replicators would have been plagued by molecular parasites, which would have been passively replicated by the RNA world machinery without contributing to it." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

"COMPLEXITY cannot solely determine behavior. A pertinent example of this is the formose reaction, whereby the incubation of the two simple precursors formaldehyde and glycoaldehyde can lead to the spontaneous synthesis of many sugars, including ribose." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

FITNESS AND SURVIVAL. "Molecular variants capable of faster replication would come to dominate a population, and the development of cycles in which templates could foster one another’s replication would have led to increasingly complex replicators and from thence to the initial genomes." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

PHYSICAL COMPLEXITY. "Complexity is not unique to living systems and can be seen in many non-living physical systems as well as in simple mathematical models." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn