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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE contemplates swarm behavior, swarm intelligence and individuality versus community living in the humble slime mold. You may find a slime mold in your back garden or in the local woods. But these creatures are far from simple. Without a brain, or with a nervous system, they are capable of remarkably complex data processing: thinking without a nervous system. View in LinkedIn

QUESTION 2. "Why Would Genes that Have a Higher Density of Introns be More Enriched in exonic splice enhancers?" https://lnkd.in/drMDPh6 View in LinkedIn

CHEMICALS AND PULSES. “Cells in close spatial proximity to one another eventually synchronise, resulting in multiple ‘competing’ pulse centres. As some oscillatory centres accumulate more cells by chance, cAMP concentrations in the surrounding areas increase, causing oscillatory centres to pulse at a faster rate, thereby releasing more cAMP into the environment.” https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/40/6/798/2400841 View in LinkedIn

QUESTION 1. "What Could be the Function(s) of exonic splice enhancers in Intronless Genes?" https://lnkd.in/drMDPh6 View in LinkedIn

SWARMING SIGNAL. “Synchronisation of behaviour is a key hallmark of many collective systems. In the cellular slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum, starvation causes cells to secrete the signal molecule cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP). These behaviours create a positive feedback loop, whereby the secretion of cAMP attracts more amoebae, who themselves react by amplifying the aggregation signal by secreting more cAMP.” https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/40/6/798/2400841 View in LinkedIn

ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONS. "Our data are thus consistent with some exonic splice enhancers having functions beyond splice promotion." https://lnkd.in/drMDPh6 View in LinkedIn

SACRIFICING INDIVIDUALITY. “By aggregating, individual Dictyostelium cells may gain the same benefits as ‘selfish herds’ of animals—individuals move towards each other to lower their risk of predation. A major protective component of the slug is the slime sheath—a mucopolysaccharide exudate, rich in protein and trilamellar cellulose that encloses the cellular core.” https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/40/6/798/2400841 View in LinkedIn

HYPOTHESIS. "We hypothesized that exonic splice enhancers might be avoided in intronless genes, as the recruitment of splicing factors to the transcript could theoretically cause the activation of cryptic splice sites and thus lead to inappropriate RNA processing." https://lnkd.in/drMDPh6 View in LinkedIn

ENVIRONMENTALLY TRIGGERED. “The Physarum slime mold is a large multinuclear cell, formed in response to environmental conditions.” https://lnkd.in/gawWKmt View in LinkedIn

EXON SKEWING. "In addition, both codon and amino acid usage are skewed near exon ends in a way that is consistent with an effect of exonic splice enhancers." https://lnkd.in/drMDPh6 View in LinkedIn