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SPECIAL CELLS. "Germ cells possess a dual identity: they are both highly specialized and uniquely capable of forming an entirely new organism." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286740800202X View in LinkedIn

FOOTNOTE. "Germ cells are often described as the ultimate totipotent stem cell. However, germ cells give rise to only sperm or eggs, and it is not until the fertilization of the egg or parthenogenesis that an entirely new organism arises. Therefore, germ cells are unipotent cells that retain a totipotent potential that is eventually transferred to the zygote at fertilization." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286740800202X View in LinkedIn

IMMORTAL GERMLINE. "At fertilization, the haploid egg and sperm genomes unite and produce an entirely new organism, and the everlasting germline cycle continues from one generation to the next. The germline thus escapes the mortality that all somatic cells of an organism ultimately confront." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286740800202X View in LinkedIn

PAIRING. "We propose that RNA transcripts retained on the chromosome play an active role in recognition of homologous chromosomes for pairing." http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6082/732 View in LinkedIn

NON-CODING RNA. "Pairing and recombination of homologous chromosomes are essential for ensuring reductional segregation in meiosis. However, the mechanisms by which chromosomes recognize their homologous partners are poorly understood. Here, we report that the sme2 gene encodes a meiosis-specific noncoding RNA that mediates homologous recognition in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe." https://lnkd.in/gNZmnGV View in LinkedIn

BIO-ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. “Maze traversal in Physarum can be modeled as a simple decision tree, optimized by ant algorithmics. This provides a simple explanation for apparently anomalous information processing by a single-celled organism. The mechanism can be viewed as a biological implementation of straightforward artificial intelligence techniques.” https://ukacc.group.shef.ac.uk/proceedings/control2008/papers/p246.pdf View in LinkedIn

MAINSTREAM VIEW. "The germ line is the one component of the organism that may aspire to immortality and its development and transmission represent the most important tasks undertaken by a multi-cellular organism." https://lnkd.in/g6Q36vi View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE is the last of two weekends considering the curious mind of the slime mold, who have no brain and no nervous system. Like trained platyhelminthes fed to their untrained companions, there is evidence of memory traces in fused slime molds. Some undetermined chemical that carries very specific and complex information. Enjoy this lovely creature. View in LinkedIn

CONTRARIAN VIEW. "Thus, August Weismann may have been wrong not only because molecular turnover is inevitable in all cell lineages but because the alleged immortality of the germ plasm takes place only under conditions of periodic genetic recombination. By themselves gametes and the germ plasm are not an immortal lineage." (L. Haflick, contrarian). https://lnkd.in/esfPTAR View in LinkedIn

IMMORTAL DAMAGE? "It is proposed here that somatic stem cell maintenance mechanisms lead to preferential accumulation, rather than disposal, of damaged stem cells. On the other hand stringent selection in the germline renders this lineage seemingly immortal." https://lnkd.in/gNUQf4C View in LinkedIn