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ESTABLISHED FACT. "The importance of massive HGT in at least two major evolutionary transitions, namely the origin of eukaryotes and the origin of the eukaryotic supergroup Archaeplastida (algae and plants), is beyond doubt." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

MASSIVE TRANSITIONS. "These observations prompted the hypothesis that emergence of new major groups of organisms often, perhaps typically, involves massive gene gain via HGT (in microbes) or extensive, in some cases, whole genome duplication (in eukaryotes) followed by gradual genome streamlining via gene loss in each of the lineages." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

STEADY AS WELL AS BURSTS. "Several large-scale reconstructions of microbial genome evolution suggest that gene loss occurs in a roughly clock-like manner whereas gene gain tends to be episodic, occurring in bursts that involve acquisition of many genes over a short time." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

DOMESTICATED MOBILE ELEMENTS. "These examples highlight the apparent major route of evolution of HGT vehicles, through stepwise domestication and “enslavement” of selfish genetic elements, such as plasmids and viruses, whereby the hosts exploit the inherent ability of such elements to transfer genetic material." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

DONATE GENES. "Notably, the GTAs confer on their carriers the ability to donate rather than acquire genetic material. Such a capacity could be adaptive in the context of utilization of “public goods” by microbial communities. The wide spread of GTAs appears to present strong evidence of evolvability of HGT." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer; GTAs = gene transfer agents). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

ACTIVE LEARNING "uses abductive logic programming to generate valid hypotheses that explain the observations; and uses these hypotheses to determine the next most informative experiment." https://lnkd.in/dUdRjJH View in LinkedIn

CHANGING MANY VARIABLES TOGETHER. "In most of science, you try to keep everything constant except for one variable. You turn one knob at a time, and see how the system responds. That’s wonderful for linear systems...But most biology is complex and non-linear. Emergent behaviors are very hard to understand unless you turn many knobs at a time, and we can’t figure out which knobs to turn. So we’re going to let Eureqa pick them.” https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

ACTIVE LEARNING. "The Robot Scientist makes use of an iterative approach to experimentation, where knowledge acquired from a previous iteration is used to guide the next experimentation step. This is a process known as Active Learning, where the learner can plan its own agenda, i.e. decide how best to improve its knowledge base and how to go about acquiring this information." https://lnkd.in/dUdRjJH View in LinkedIn

SCRAPYARD MINING. "This knowledge will initially correspond to the goals of the scientific task, but increasingly the internet repositories that are often constructed to store the data have become the focus of less directed scientific study, where "hidden" knowledge not originally anticipated by the goals of the scientific task may be found. However, this "scrapyard" approach is partly a result of overexperimentation where many unnecessary experiments were conducted along with the potentially informative ones." https://lnkd.in/dUdRjJH View in LinkedIn

BIOINFORMATICS DATA MINING. "It has become typical practice in Bioinformatics to separate the data collection or experimentation process and the understanding process, where large numbers of experiments are conducted and then specially designed data mining tools are used to identify correlations in the data that might represent hitherto undiscovered scientific knowledge." https://lnkd.in/dUdRjJH View in LinkedIn