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LEGO SETS. “Our ongoing research also revealed that nematodes produce a large diversity of additional compounds by the combinatorial assembly of building blocks from primary and secondary metabolic pathways.” https://lnkd.in/d4DhYhz View in LinkedIn

WORD ORGANIZATION. “Ascarosides are organized in a very similar fashion, because they are all based on the dideoxy-sugar ascarylose and feature variations in the attached fatty-acid-derived side chain. Analogous to bacterial AHL signaling, different nematode species produce and respond to specific combinations of ascarosides. Based on recent findings describing modular assembly of ascaroside structures from a diverse array of biosynthetic building blocks, it is likely that many additional ascaroside structures exist in nematodes, perhaps also in species we analyzed in this study.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

BACTERIAL ANALOGY. “The conserved nature of ascaroside signaling is evocative of bacterial quorum sensing, where acyl homoserine lactones (AHLs) are both produced and sensed by many species of gram-negative bacteria. AHLs are based on a small invariable core structure, the homoserine lactone, which bears a fatty-acid-derived side chain featuring species-specific chemical modifications.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

DISTRIBUTION UNCERTAIN. “Ascarosides have not yet been found in any other animal phylum, and thus we hypothesized that short-chain ascarosides comprise a nematode-specific chemical code mediating a variety of behaviors in many different species.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

CODE ADULTERATION. "Several debuggers modify the target application’s code. The de-bugger by Vanegue et al., for example, injects its code into the debugged process. Other designs such as gdb also modify the target’s code to implement break-points, by replacing the target code with a software interrupt instruction." https://lnkd.in/dHTSZ_H View in LinkedIn

BEHAVIOR CHANGING WORDS. “In C. elegans, a family of small-molecule pheromones called ascarosides regulates gender-specific attraction, repulsion, aggregation, olfactory plasticity, and entry into dauer (a stress-resistant life stage), collectively demonstrating that ascarosides mediate a wide range of C. elegans behaviors.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS. "Imagine a variety of components: hardware and software modules, files, websites, interfaces, users... All these components interact by exchanging information. Assume that neighboring components have the capability to mutually adapt: by sending messages back and forth they negotiate until they achieve a common "understanding", in which they both can settle. But coordination does not stop there: it propagates back and forth between all components, until a globally stable order is created." https://lnkd.in/dkkAEiE View in LinkedIn

CONSERVED DIALECT. “Ascaroside Signaling Is Widely Conserved among Nematodes. A group of small molecules called ascarosides has been found to mediate mate finding, aggregation, and developmental diapause in Caenorhabditis elegans, but it is unknown whether ascaroside signaling exists outside of the genus Caenorhabditis.” https://lnkd.in/d6G6mZ9 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this two weekend fragment from nature on modular language by a type of worm that appears to have syntax rules and significant complexity. It seems that whenever we assume that a creature is simple, time reverses that conclusion, proving perhaps it is us who are simple. We only invented the printing press (in the west) in the fourteenth century; these creatures have been printing words for millennia. View in LinkedIn

THE WORDS. “The term ascaroside was first created to describe a novel lipid detected in the intestinal parasite Ascaris lumbricoides over 100 years ago. These lipophilic molecules, containing long aliphatic side chains, formed a layer around Ascaris eggs to protect against harsh environmental conditions. More recently, a larger collection of more hydrophilic ascarosides has been identified in C. elegans and other related nematodes and has been shown to regulate a multitude of behaviors and aspects of the life history of the worm including development, mate attraction, aggregation, and repulsion.” https://lnkd.in/dGAHbZv View in LinkedIn