Category: Uncategorized

A BETTER LIFE. "An evolutionary advantage may accrue to allopolyploids from higher rates of population establishment and persistence. This may occur because genome doubling, especially when two divergent genomes are present, provides an immediate vehicle for transcending parental niches." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. “An explanation of life's origin is fundamentally incomplete in the absence of an account of how the unique causal role played by information in living systems first emerged. In other words, we need to explain the origin of both the hardware and software aspects of life, or the job is only half finished.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn

FITNESS ADVANTAGE. "Although we found that autopolyploids and allopolyploids occurred near parity in nature, allopolyploids likely have a significant evolutionary advantage. Autopolyploid plants were probably produced in higher numbers than allopolyploid plants throughout contemporary species’ ranges and over the course of deep time. The differential might have been five-fold or 20-fold." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

Word ban at CDC includes 'vulnerable,' 'fetus,' 'transgender' http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/16/health/cdc-banned-words/index.html View in LinkedIn

ALLOPOLYPLOID. "Definition of allopolyploid: a polyploid individual or strain having a chromosome set composed of two or more chromosome sets derived more or less complete from different species." https://lnkd.in/e-MaEau View in LinkedIn

AUTOPOLYPLOID. "Definition of autopolyploid: an individual or strain whose chromosome complement consists of more than two complete copies of the genome of a single ancestral species." https://lnkd.in/ewCPSzA View in LinkedIn

VAST NUMBER OF POLYPLOID SPECIES. "Our survey found that 53.2% of polyploid taxa were unnamed and that c. 24% of all plant taxa were polyploids. Assuming these numbers are representative for angiosperms, we estimate that there may be an additional c. 51 000–61 000 cryptic polyploid species." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

POLYPLOIDY PLANTS. "How many unnamed polyploid flowering plant species exist in nature? Current estimates suggest there are c. 350 000 named flowering plant species with another 10–20% to be named in general." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

MEIOTIC MISHAP. "Environmental stress often triggers unreduced gamete production, suggesting that unreduced gametes may facilitate polyploid speciation in response to changing environments. Thus, although unreduced gamete formation may be a meiotic mishap, we suggest that unreduced gametes can be more explicitly considered as a mechanism for evolutionary speciation that should be measured and tested across and within lineages for exaptive evolution (a feature with evolutionary utility that has not arisen under conventional selective pressure) and evolvability (the capacity to generate adaptive genetic variation)." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952514001590 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this brief venture into the evolution of biological information, which is at the core of life itself. Among its quandaries, and for another time, are the issues around prions and viruses. They contain biological information, but many scientists consider them non-living despite being able to replicate and to evolve. There is always more to learn. View in LinkedIn