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DIVERSITY. "The work presented here aims to parallel the second major event in the history of life, the origin of diversity. Rather than attempting to create prebiotic conditions from which life may emerge, this approach involves engineering over the early history of life to design complex evolvable organisms, and then attempting to create the conditions that will set off a spontaneous evolutionary process of increasing diversity and complexity of organisms." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

FLY IN OINTMENT. "Most evolutionary simulations are not open-ended. Their potential is limited by the structure of the model, which generally endows each individual with a genome consisting of a set of pre-defined genes, each of which may exist in a pre-defined set of allelic forms." False assumption given what we know about horizontal gene shuffling. (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

MODEL SYSTEMS. "These digital communities have been used to experimentally study ecological and evolutionary processes: e.g., competitive exclusion and coexistance, symbiosis, host/parasite density dependent population regulation, the effects of parasites in enhancing community diversity, evolutionary arms races, punctuated equilibrium, and the role of chance and historical factors in evolution." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL ECOLOGIES. "Diverse ecological communities have emerged." https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

EVOLVING DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM. "Hyper-parasites evolved which subvert parasites to their own reproduction and drive them to extinction. The resulting genetically uniform communities evolve sociality in the sense of creatures that can only reproduce in cooperative aggregations, and these aggregations are then invaded by cheating hyper-hyper-parasites." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

POSSIBLY WIDESPREAD. “Highly complex modular ascaroside assemblies are not restricted to C. elegans and have also been characterized in the necromenic Pristionchus pacificus that is associated with scarab beetles. While the general building blocks utilized by C. elegans and P. pacificus are somewhat similar, the resulting modular assemblies are highly species-specific.” https://lnkd.in/d4DhYhz View in LinkedIn

WORD CONTEXTS. “Overlapping mixtures of these pheromones affect the development of the worm and a variety of different behaviors.” https://lnkd.in/dXsN6Pj View in LinkedIn

MANY DECORATIONS. “The ascaroside core structures originating from peroxisomal β-oxidation serve as scaffolds for the highly species-specific attachment of additional building blocks originating from diverse primary metabolic pathways, including fatty acid, citric acid, amino acid, carbohydrate, and nucleoside metabolism, to generate highly complex modular assemblies.” https://lnkd.in/d4DhYhz View in LinkedIn

CHRISTMAS TREE DECORATIONS. “Downstream of the canonical β-oxidation cycle the basic ascarosides can undergo various species-specific modifications, thus giving rise to a large diversity of unique signaling molecules that represent the chemical language of nematodes.” https://lnkd.in/d4DhYhz View in LinkedIn

UNKNOWN “Ascarosides comprise a family of small signaling molecules that have been shown to regulate important events and behaviors in the life history of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Although the different roles of individual ascarosides appear to be determined by the variances in chemical structure, the mechanisms by which ascarosides are synthesized as well as the locations in which ascarosides are produced within the worm are largely unknown.” https://lnkd.in/dGAHbZv View in LinkedIn