Month: September 2022

GENE EVOLUTION. We have completed a small peek into synthetic DNA and the creation of synthetic life. Now our journey starts to look at gene evolution itself, the heart of the engine of life. View in LinkedIn

NEW GENES. How do they arise? Are there gene life cycles in evolutionary terms? What permits some to persist? And, how do genes die and become extinct? How is all this regulated within the genome? View in LinkedIn

REGULATION VS NOVELTY. "The great leap forward. Major evolutionary jumps might be caused by changes in gene regulation rather than the emergence of new genes." https://lnkd.in/eNHFjJ8 View in LinkedIn

GENOTYPE ASSUMPTION. "One of the great challenges in molecular and evolutionary biology is to explain the link between giant evolutionary leaps, such as the colonization of land by plants or the emergence of vertebrates, and the underlying genetic and genomic changes. For a long time, biologists thought that such profound changes in phenotype would be accompanied—if not driven by—equally dramatic upheavals at the genetic level." https://lnkd.in/eNHFjJ8 View in LinkedIn

CRITICAL THRESHOLD. "Understanding the mechanisms underlying the morphological divergence of species is one of the central goals of evolutionary biology. How many genes contribute to species divergence?" https://lnkd.in/dGSGXuT View in LinkedIn

GENETIC ASSUMPTION. "The emergence of the flowering plants within the plant kingdom, or mammalian vertebrates, must surely have been marked by recognizable changes in the genome." https://lnkd.in/eNHFjJ8 View in LinkedIn

GENE-DRIVEN DOGMA. "It was natural for scientists to assume that protein-encoding genes would be at the heart of evolutionary progress. After all, evolution has created organisms with radically different appearances and functional components." https://lnkd.in/eNHFjJ8 View in LinkedIn

"CONSERVATION of gene and protein sequence, and, therefore, conservation of the resulting molecular interactions that mediate biological processes, is foundational to our understanding of biology. This conservation allows discovery in one organism, such as worms or mice, to inform our understanding of the biology in another organism, such as humans." https://lnkd.in/dFMjBuF View in LinkedIn

NEW THINKING. "There is emerging recognition that many biological processes involve important non-conserved elements, and that de novo gene birth provides an important mechanism for functional evolution." https://lnkd.in/dFMjBuF View in LinkedIn

RETROFITTING IS HARDER. "Although it is possible for novel functions to arise within an existing gene, it is likely that there will be some degree of antagonism or adaptive conflict between the new and the old functions. By contrast, new loci are free of such constraints and constitute genetic novelty that may form the basis for lineage-specific adaptations and diversification." https://lnkd.in/dPqZs3m View in LinkedIn