Month: September 2022

JUST A CHINK OF THE UNIVERSE. “Steven Weinberg elegantly captured the duality between classical physics and the new quantum cosmology: “Our expanding universe is mostly dark energy and dark matter. In this darkness there is a small admixture, a few percent of the whole, which consists of the ordinary matter that makes up the stars and planets and us.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

JUST A CHINK OF NATURE. “Analogously, classical biology describes the familiar world of multi-cellular eukaryotes, which historically were believed to be the biosphere. New tools are now making it possible to study the vast, heretofore mostly uncharacterized, prokaryotic world of microbial life.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

“BIOLOGICAL DARK MATTER, akin to cosmological dark matter, is an apt descriptor for this overwhelming and unseen component of the biosphere. These studies are forcing us to recognize that, rather than typifying life, multi-cellular eukaryotes are actually a derived and highly constrained evolutionary subset of the biosphere.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

MINOR PLAYERS IN UNPEAR-SHAPED WORLD. “Prokaryotes comprise about half the biomass of the non-viral biosphere and nearly all of its physiological biodiversity (defined in terms of diversity of tolerated ecological conditions and biochemical capacities). To paraphrase Weinberg, our biosphere is mostly biological dark matter.” (Half the biomass is understated: today, we have only described, let alone characterized,

THE FEW PERCENTAGE CROWD. “In this darkness there is a small admixture, a few percent of the whole, which consists of the ordinary multi-cellular eukaryotic life that makes up the fungi and plants and animals and us. As such, the properties and behavior of biological dark matter comprise what might be termed, metaphorically, quantum biology.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

OUR REALITY IS A DERIVED CONDITION. “The relationship of quantum biology to classical biology has much in common with the relationship between quantum and classical physics. In both cases, the quantum realms deal with very small entities that behave in a counter-intuitive manner, profoundly different from classical understanding. And, in both cases the quantum realm is proving to be the more fundamental, with the classical view describing a derived and specialized condition.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

PEAR-SHAPED WORLD. “Despite multi-cellular eukaryotes being merely that “few percent of the whole,” nearly all of classical biology, from Aristotle onwards, has been based on the composition and characteristics of multi-cellular eukaryotes. To put it bluntly, classical biology has been the study of multi-cellular eukaryotes by multi-cellular eukaryotes for multi-cellular eukaryotes.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

HIDDEN THIRD WORLD. “Woese and Fox, in perhaps the most important biodiversity discovery of the past 100 years, used what were then cutting edge molecular tools to disprove the existing notion that the biosphere could be divided dichotomously into eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Instead, hidden among the prokaryotes they found another group—the Archaea—that was as different from the bacteria as either were from the eukaryotes.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

HERETICS FIRST. “Not surprisingly, Woese’s work was originally doubted, even ridiculed, by many biologists. One referred to him as “a crank, who was using a crazy technique to answer an impossible question”. Subsequent improvements in sequencing technology, however, allowed the confirmation of a three-domain biosphere, of which the two prokaryotic realms are essentially alien to classical biology. Now, the three-domain view is well established, even at the level of introductory textbooks.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

INVISIBLE UNCULTURABLES. “Historically, far more cells have been seen by direct observation than could not be enticed to develop into colonies. Measurements of the ratio of culturable to actual cells range from 10(-2) to 10(-8), indicating that the vast majority of environmental prokaryotic cells cannot be studied in the laboratory, rendering them—until now—effectively invisible to science.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn