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LATE EVENT. "There is a considerable amount of consilience between the phylogenetic, cell biology, population biology, biochemical and pale-ontological evidence in favour of a scenario in which a merger of just two prokaryotes — one eubacterial and one archaebacterial— formed the eukaryotic cell relatively late in the history of life." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

SHIFT TO VERTICAL WEBS. "Vertical orientation not only helps araneoid orb-webs intercept more prey but also to retain them for longer, as escaping prey are more likely to fall into lower parts and become re-entangled. A vertical web may intercept more prey; however, such prey are typically larger, faster flying insects that impact the web with greater energy. This shift to a vertical web orientation was facilitated by a major shift in the type of capture silk used in the web." https://lnkd.in/dqTjK77 View in LinkedIn

DISEASE GENES VS CONSTITUTIVE GENES. "In terms of human disease, eubacterial genes are significantly more likely to be involved in Mendelian diseases than archaebacterial genes. This is because archaebacterial genes are more important for human cellular functioning, and mutations are more likely to be lethal and less likely to feature in diseases of living individuals." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

NEW SILK. "While dragline silk in both orb-web spiders and less-derived (non-orb) spiders is impressively strong and tough, there is a significant increase in material properties associated with the origin of orb-web spiders. Spiders within the Orbiculariae also evolved a new type of capture silk (viscid silk) that is currently considered to play an important role in stopping large, fast-flying prey." https://lnkd.in/dqTjK77 View in LinkedIn

GENETIC MOSAIC. "Archaebacteria-affiliated genes are more highly and broadly expressed in humans, they evolve more slowly than eubacterial genes and are more central in human PINs. By contrast, eubacterial genes have duplicated much more than archaebacterial genes, and the proportion of eubacteria-affiliated genes in humans exceeds that in yeast." (PINs = protein interaction networks). https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

AERIAL WEB SILK EVOLUTION. "Spiders also responded to greater web stresses by evolving silks with enhanced mechanical properties. Dragline silk evolved early in the evolutionary history of spiders, long before the origin of orb-webs." https://lnkd.in/dqTjK77 View in LinkedIn

SINGULAR EVENT. "So, why did prokaryotes not evolve into eukaryotes more than once? The reason is that it is impossible to generate this amount of energy in a single cell unless that cell has a powerhouse of energy production with a large membrane surface — that is, a mitochondrion." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend with a consideration of the biology of spider webs, how they arose, and how and why they function as they do. It is a lovely story of inventiveness at many scales: the molecular design of the material with sliding hydrogen bonds giving it toughness; the various positioning of the webs giving rise to substrate freedom; and the web geometry that exploits efficiency of an expensive material with high functionality for a powerful prey. View in LinkedIn

HYDROGEN POWERED train in Germany. https://lnkd.in/dXv_6qC View in LinkedIn

FALSE PREMISE 4. "Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, it is difficult and may be impossible to eliminate eukaryocentric bias from the measures by which eukaryotes as a whole are judged to have achieved greater success than prokaryotes as a whole." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn