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France becomes first country to ban plastic cups and plates http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/19/europe/france-bans-plastic-cups-plates/index.html View in LinkedIn

"WOLBACHIA are common intracellular bacteria that are found in arthropods and nematodes. These alphaproteobacteria endosymbionts are transmitted vertically through host eggs and alter host biology in diverse ways. Within arthropods, Wolbachia is a reproductive parasite, manipulating the reproductive biology of hosts to increase its own transmission. Although usually vertically inherited, Wolbachia can also move horizontally across species boundaries, resulting in a widespread and global distribution in diverse invertebrate hosts." https://lnkd.in/ekadN4H View in LinkedIn

SELECTIVE CONSTRAINT. "These findings imply that the CNGs are subject to a very strong and continual selective constraint, enabling them to remain largely unchanged for as long as 300 million years." (CNG = conserved nongenic (non-gene) sequences). https://lnkd.in/eFvUyrd View in LinkedIn

SUCCESS STRATEGY #5: "heritable microbes such as Wolbachia." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

FIDELITY. "The faithfulness of conservation which this study observed in the CNGs is unprecedented. The most highly conserved ones have a nucleotide substitution rate, across the studied mammals, that is less than half that of protein-coding genes." (CNG = conserved nongenic (non-gene).sequences). https://lnkd.in/eFvUyrd View in LinkedIn

SUCCESS STRATEGY #4: "Medea elements that eliminate competing siblings who do not inherit them." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY TOLERANCES. "It was already known that there are sequences outside of genes that are well-conserved between the human and mouse genomes. Untranslated regulatory sequences need to be conserved, for example. But regulatory sequences have more error tolerance than genes, not less." https://lnkd.in/eFvUyrd View in LinkedIn

SUCCESS STRATEGY #3: "transposons that insert copies of themselves elsewhere in the genome." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

BROAD ONION TEST. "Importantly, the comparison is not restricted to onions versus humans. It could as easily be between pufferfish and lungfish, which differ by ∼350-fold, or members of the genus Allium, which have more than a 4-fold range in genome size that is not the result of polyploidy." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

THE ONION TEST. "The domestic onion, Allium cepa, is a diploid plant (2n = 16) with a haploid genome size of roughly 16 billion base pairs (16 Gbp), or about five times larger than humans." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn