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LAW OF THE RATCHET. "Demise caused by Muller’s ratchet appears to be the typical fate of bacteria that are confined to intracellular parasitism or symbiosis, although the ratchet can be slowed down by lowering the mutation rate." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

ASEXUAL DEAD END. "Clonal populations typically deteriorate due to the action of the evolutionary mechanism known as Muller’s ratchet, i.e. gradual loss of fitness and eventual extinction caused by accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations via genetic drift." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

DEPENDENT ON HGT. "Can microbes evolve without substantial HGT, simply via the competition of clonal populations? Apparently not, as population genetic modeling indicates that this evolutionary regime is unsustainable in the long term." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

DIFFERENT MECHANISM. "In a sharp contrast to eukaryotes, in bacteria and archaea, the dominant feature of genome evolution is not gene duplication but rather evolution by extensive gene loss and gene gain via HGT." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

BUGS DEFY DARWINIAN EVOLUTION. "Taken together, the reconstructions of the dynamics of microbial genome evolution show that, in the microbial world, evolution primarily occurs not via the classic Darwinian process adopted by the Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary Biology, i.e. gradual accumulation of numerous, “infinitesimally small” changes (mutations), but rather by much bigger, at least gene-sized, leaps." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

PATTERNED MASSIVE DATASETS. "The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind and its standard computational tools." (Hod Lipson, Cornell University). https://lnkd.in/dyU_N5f View in LinkedIn

SCIENTIFIC EFFICIENCY. "If science was more efficient it would be better placed to help solve society’s problems. One way to make science more efficient is through automation. Automation was the driving force behind much of the 19th and 20th century progress, and this is likely to continue." https://lnkd.in/dMfcK8Q View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends contemplating horizontal gene transfer. The world of microbes is so different from the eukaryotic world, and this is strongly highlighted by the free flow of genes between these creatures, and as we will see next weekend, between microbes and eukaryotes. Horizontal gene transfer in microbes finds its equivalent in eukaryotic sex, serving to fresh the genome from bad mutations and to be a fountain of genetic innovation. View in LinkedIn

ROBOT-HUMAN SCIENCE TEAMS. "Ultimately we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories. Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail. This is difficult and irksome for human scientists, but easy for Robot Scientists." https://lnkd.in/dMfcK8Q View in LinkedIn

GENE INTAKE. "However, the demonstration that at least in some bacteria the ingested DNA is protected against degradation, thus preventing its use as a nucleotide source and conversely facilitating HGT, implies that, at least in part, natural competence evolved as a gene transfer mechanism." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn