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VIRAL EDITORS OF HOST SYSTEMS. "The concept is that viruses are fully competent agents and editors of all host systems of instruction (DNA, RNA, epigenetic, translational etc.). Thus, they provide the host with new sources of instruction systems (not errors). In addition, they promote network formation by providing coherent societies (quasispecies populations) of agents able to edit host code content (and add new identity) in a diffuse, distributed manner, which promotes the creation of and editing of host regulatory networks." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apm.12485/full View in LinkedIn

VIRAL TOOLKIT. "These viral colonizers then can also be used to provide new sources of host complexity (such as the placenta)." https://lnkd.in/etdQ9rN View in LinkedIn

VIRAL RESISTANCE. "We have come to recently realize that viruses are omnipresent so all life must survive in its virosphere habitat. And such survival often involves virus themselves since virus, their defective and various other genetic parasites (mostly called transposons) can and often do provide virus resistance systems." https://lnkd.in/etdQ9rN View in LinkedIn

HUMAN GENOME RELICS. “Most of the junk consists of: (1) very obvious examples of broken genes (pseudogenes 5%); (2) bits and pieces of transposon sequences that used to be capable of transposing but have mutated over time (45%); and (3) ancient viral sequences that have degenerated (9%). That's 59% of the genome that's clearly junk DNA. In addition, there's plenty of evidence that most intron sequences are dispensable. That accounts for another 28% of the genome. The total amount of junk DNA is at least 87%.“ https://lnkd.in/d2xZtXk View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend on the positive impact of viruses on life on this planet. For a very long time, viruses have only been associated with diseases, and little else was known about them. But few are pathogenic, and the rest have played either benign or astonishingly advantageous roles during evolution. We still have a long way to go in understanding them. Just look at the composition of our own genomes, replete with viral footprints. What does this mean? View in LinkedIn

PREFERRED CODONS. "Such codons are translated more accurately and more efficiently because they are recognized by more abundant tRNA molecules with more specific anti-codon binding. While this kind of selection acting on synonymous mutations is widely accepted, it is generally estimated to be weak - nearly, if not quite, neutral." https://lnkd.in/dU2Q65U View in LinkedIn

NEW IDEAS. “If the viral channel proteins are simplified versions of cellular proteins recently acquired from their hosts, then we would expect to see a high level of sequence similarity between the viral and host homologs. However, this traditional view of virus evolution has been challenged by recent phylogenetic studies of genes in large eukaryotic viruses and prokaryotic viruses.” https://lnkd.in/dsexZC2 View in LinkedIn

CODON BIAS. "Highly expressed genes and codons encoding functionally important amino acids generally display particularly biased patterns of codon usage. This observation led to the theory that selection for translation optimization generates higher levels of codon bias. In other words, it is thought that the speed and accuracy of mRNA translation is higher for a subset of codons, referred to as “optimal” (“preferred”) codons." https://lnkd.in/dU2Q65U View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR PIRACY? “The fact that K+ channels from all eukaryotes contain a common pore structure that resembles the viral K+ channels is consistent with the traditional assumption that viruses are mere ‘gene pick pockets’ and frequently acquire genes from their host via molecular piracy.” https://lnkd.in/dsexZC2 View in LinkedIn

HISTORICAL DOGMA. "Synonymous sites are then the collection of potential synonymous mutations present in a gene. Predicated on the assumption that the coding sequences of a gene is simply the recipe for making the protein, synonymous mutations were long thought to have no functional effect, in other words to be “silent” and thus selectively neutral." https://lnkd.in/dU2Q65U View in LinkedIn