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GENE UPREGULATION. "Plants also respond to touch in the short-term, though how these events are connected to long-term changes in body plan remains unclear. Following a single touch event, plants rapidly upregulate a large number of genes; in Arabidopsis as much as 2.5% of its genome." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR SENSITIVITY. "Plants are also able to sense the number and frequency of stem bending events. When several bends are imposed on poplar stems, the impact on the transcriptome becomes less pronounced from the second bending event onwards. It also takes no less than a week without bending for a stem to recover full molecular sensitivity to such mechanical deformation." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

PLANT NUMERACY. "There is evidence that plants are able to record the number and frequency of mechanical stimuli. The Venus flytrap uses action potentials to measure the number of times an insect touches the trigger hairs of its trap over the course of an hour." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

"THREE HALLMARKS of thigmomorphogenesis are: a dose responsiveness that prevents the plant from responding to isolated events, a systemic nature such that a stimulus applied to one organ leads to changes in overall plant morphology, and a characteristic delay between the initial stimulus and the developmental response." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

REGULATOR VALIDATION. "We show here that the Arabidopsis Paf1 complex is a critical factor for stem and root thigmomorphogenesis, stereotypical alterations in plant form that are made in response to repeated mechanical disturbance." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

PLANT TOUCH RESPONSES. "Over many years of evolution, plants have developed very sensitive mechanisms through which they can perceive and respond to even subtle stimuli, like touch. Some plants respond behaviourally to the touch stimulus within seconds, while others show morphogenetic alterations over long periods of time, ranging from days to weeks." https://lnkd.in/dbRzjKM View in LinkedIn

GENE EVOLUTION. We have completed a small peek into synthetic DNA and the creation of synthetic life. Now our journey starts to look at gene evolution itself, the heart of the engine of life. View in LinkedIn

FRACTIONAL MUTATIONS. "Because only a tiny fraction of all mutations that have ever occurred during evolution have been fixed, the “successes” that we see today provide an incomplete or even biased understanding of the evolutionary process." The evolutionary rubbish bin is essentially hidden and likely very full. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6287/769 View in LinkedIn

REAR VIEW MIRROR. "The field of molecular evolution is concerned with evolutionary changes in genes and genomes and the underlying driving forces behind those changes. Current studies in molecular evolution are almost entirely retrospective, with a focus on the mutations that were fixed during evolution, and the conclusions are often explanatory, offering no predictive insights." https://lnkd.in/dq6c-q7 View in LinkedIn

LIFE AS I.T. "We defined the terms “synthetic life” and “synthetic cells” in a reasonably specific way, as cells completely controlled only by a synthetic DNA chromosome. The synthetic genome was the software of life, which specified every protein robot in the cell, and therefore every one of the cell’s functions. From the public response to our announcement and scientific publication, however, it was clear that some found it hard to accept the concept of life as an information system." https://lnkd.in/eyZU783 View in LinkedIn