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TWO DIMENSIONAL SNAPSHOT. “Presently, the genomic era defines the viral universe by characterizing genotypes, but these genotypes are rarely associated with a phenotype and/or a physical entity.” https://lnkd.in/g35Hmrp View in LinkedIn

RNA VIRUSES are even more obscure because replication infidelity makes them mutate so fast, lacking the DNA polymerase proofreading mechanism of DNA viruses leading to huge mutant swarms. “Currently there are 5 orders and 47 families of RNA viruses recognised. There are also many unassigned species and genera.” https://lnkd.in/gG8F5cw View in LinkedIn

VIROME CONCEPT. “A different view of viruses has recently emerged, the virome, a name for the entire community of viruses found in a given biome.” Once again, the trend in biology today is about context. https://lnkd.in/g35Hmrp View in LinkedIn

NO COMMON THREADS. “Studying viral sequences means working at the edge of human knowledge. Even microbial genomics experts working on uncultivated microbes use the term “dark matter” when describing the viral sequences they find in metagenomes. While metagenomics expands our ability to detect viruses, a combination of small viral sequence databases and great diversity still means that many viral reads have no homology to known viruses.” https://lnkd.in/g35Hmrp View in LinkedIn

BACKLOG. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). “In the current (2013) ICTV taxonomy, 7 orders have been established, the Caudovirales, Herpesvirales, Ligamenvirales, Mononegavirales, Nidovirales, Picornavirales, and Tymovirales. The committee does not formally distinguish between subspecies, strains, and isolates. In total there are 7 orders, 103 families, 22 subfamilies, 455 genera, about 2,827 species and over 4,000 types yet unclassified.” https://lnkd.in/eF3wTsF View in LinkedIn

VIRAL DARK MATTER. “Our understanding of viral diversity and virus–host interactions remains a major bottleneck in the development of predictive ecosystem models and unifying eco-evolutionary theories. This is because the lack of a universal marker gene for viruses hinders environmental survey capabilities, while the number of isolate viral genomes in databases remains limited: for comparison, more than 25,000 bacterial and archaeal host genomes are available in NCBI RefSeq (January 2015), whereas only 1,531 of their viruses were entirely sequenced and most (86%) of these derive from only 3 of 61 known host phyla.” https://lnkd.in/gQQCawV View in LinkedIn

CRITICAL TRANSITION. "The evolution from hermaphroditism to dioecy (separate sexes) is considered one of the most important evolutionary transitions in the reproductive history of angiosperms. Although relatively rare (approx. 6 % of species), dioecy is a widespread reproductive system in angiosperms (reported in approx. 38 % of families." https://lnkd.in/guzeMTD View in LinkedIn

INTERMEDIATE STEP. "Although a direct transition has sometimes been suggested, the transition probably involved intermediate steps in most cases, as it seems unlikely that male and female sterility mutations arise simultaneously in hermaphroditic species." https://lnkd.in/guzeMTD View in LinkedIn

"SEXUAL DIMORPHISM describes differences between the sexes in primary and secondary sex characters. The former relate directly to male (androecium) and female (gynoecium) sexual organs, and the latter to differences between the sexes in structures other than sex organs themselves, including any aspect of morphology or physiology." https://lnkd.in/ge7JD6J View in LinkedIn

How a DNA revolution has decoded the origins of our humanity https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/19/human-evolution-dna-revolution-mapping-genome?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other View in LinkedIn