Month: September 2022

ENZYMATIC SALTATIONS. "Enzymes are erroneously considered exquisitely precise and efficient molecular catalysts. Natural enzymes are also evolvable: in other words, they can migrate through mutational trajectories to arrive at alternative catalytic activities, sometimes in unexpected saltatory fashion." https://lnkd.in/d3RnrBP View in LinkedIn

NOT PERFECT. "How does an enzyme evolve from a given ancestral function to novel functions through descent with modification? Following scrutiny of multitude enzyme behaviors, it has been increasingly recognized that enzymes are not as ‘perfected’ as we assumed, but rather contain varying levels of catalytic promiscuity." https://lnkd.in/d3RnrBP View in LinkedIn

ENZYMATIC PLASTICITY. "Enzyme catalytic promiscuity is intrinsically associated with the dynamic nature of proteins, and indeed encompasses a range of mechanistic processes, namely substrate permissiveness, mechanistic elasticity and concomitant product diversity." https://lnkd.in/d3RnrBP View in LinkedIn

HIGH TURNOVER RATE. "According to a recent estimation, out of the four billion species that ever lived on the Earth over the past 3.5 billion yr, only 1% of them have survived until today." https://lnkd.in/d3RnrBP View in LinkedIn

GIANT GAPS. "It is very common to find huge phylogenetic gaps that will never be known with certainty even with the most sophisticated means of ‘resurrecting’ so-called ancient proteins, particularly as the phylogenies used for such calculations represent a very sparse sampling of extant organisms." https://lnkd.in/d3RnrBP View in LinkedIn

GIANT GAPS. "It is very common to find huge phylogenetic gaps that will never be known with certainty even with the most sophisticated means of ‘resurrecting’ so-called ancient proteins, particularly as the phylogenies used for such calculations represent a very sparse sampling of extant organisms." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12416/full View in LinkedIn

SWEPT AWAY. "In short, most evolutionary intermediates – nodes on a phylogenetic tree – were swept away in parallel by distinct lineages, even those intermediates providing historical fitness advantages in organismal populations." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12416/full View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY MODEL. "However, plant specialized metabolism, which has expanded exponentially over the past 500 million yr, provides a phylogenetically rich system for studying evolutionary processes leading to metabolic complexity on varying biological, chemical, architectural and time scales." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12416/full View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this section on the subject of the evolution of complexity. The story of enzymes was informative: culturally we have an image of an enzymes as exquisitely tailored to a very specific function, a frozen perfection of evolution; but in fact they are simply just molecules in a great tide of evolution whose forms are full of maladaptations, imprecisions, and transient forms. Great swaths of their history has been lost to the disinterested and restless actions of evolution that has obliterated 99% of her experiments. View in LinkedIn

INSECT SWARM INTELLIGENCE. "(1) Individuals of the same species cooperate in the care for the young ones; (2) individuals share the reproductive division of labor, sterile individuals work for the benefit of fertile individuals; (3) an overlap of at least two generations exists, so that the offspring can help parents to carry out the tasks necessary to the life of the colony." https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn