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SINGLE ENTITY MUTANT SWARMS. "A realization of recent years is that mutant swarms are not mere collections of mutants ranked by a mutation-selection balance that act independently of each other. Rather, very often the mutant ensemble acts as a unit of selection due to interactions among its members." https://lnkd.in/dJdEQAk View in LinkedIn

"A SPECIES is often defined as a group of individuals that actually or potentially interbreed in nature. In this sense, a species is the biggest gene pool possible under natural conditions. The definition of a species as a group of interbreeding individuals cannot be easily applied to organisms that reproduce only or mainly asexually. Also, many plants, and some animals, form hybrids in nature. Should they be considered the same species or separate species?" https://lnkd.in/e3Bgi6R View in LinkedIn

NEGATIVE SELECTION. "Mutant swarm generation might be prevented only if negative (or purifying) selection eliminated the great majority of newly arising mutant genomes, which is not the case. Current evidence suggests that a considerable proportion of mutants might be eliminated by negative selection, but it is not clear whether all mutations considered lethal by standard measurements of viral production might not be in reality low fitness variants that can populate low frequency levels of mutant spectra, either because they can replicate minimally or because they are helped by complementation." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE: this meditation considers viral hybrid swarms and quasispecies, which cloud traditional thinking about species. As usual, viral entities thumb their noses at biological norms, and on the topic of species, it is a spectacular thumbing. Viruses challenge biologists to rethink many old assumptions. View in LinkedIn

DYNAMIC CONSEQUENCE. "Thus, formation of mutant spectra with an abundance of single point mutants (and gradually decreasing proportions of double, triple and multiple mutants) is a necessary consequence of the mutation rate-genome size relationship." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

PROGRESSIVE PROCESS. “Evolution is cumulative, for it has “the power to build new progress on the shoulders of earlier generations of progress”. https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

PERFECT STORM. "Since the size of RNA viral genomes lies between 3 kb and 33 kb, close to the inverse of the mutation rate, it is thought that it is unlikely to produce progeny RNAs identical to the parental genome even within the confined limits of a single replicative unit (each one of the replication complexes) within a single infected cell." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

MASSIVE MUTATION RATE. "Mutation rates have been estimated by independent genetic and biochemical approaches to be in the range of 10(−3) – 10(−5) mutations introduced per nucleotide copied, almost a million-fold higher than standard mutation rates operating on cellular DNA. This difference led Holland et al. to emphasize in a seminal paper a number of disease implications of a rapidly evolving RNA world immersed in a far more static cellular DNA world." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER INFORMATION. "Computers store data in two-valued bits, grouped as bytes of 7 or more bits (for ASCII). One byte holds 2^7=128 unique values.DNA stores data in four-valued base pairs, which RNA then groups as codons of 3 pairs. One codon holds 4^3=2^6=64 unique values." http://www.decodedscience.org/comparing-genetic-code-dna-binary-code/55476 View in LinkedIn

GENETIC INFORMATION. "One might suggest that the genetic information is equally carried by the amino acids produced by the codons. So that is a total information of 4,392,322,500 bits including the epigenome. In ASCII code, that would be 627,474,642 MB (megabytes)." http://www.decodedscience.org/comparing-genetic-code-dna-binary-code/55476 View in LinkedIn