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MILLION TIMES EVOLUTION. "Viruses are arguably the fastest-evolving biological entity on this planet. Many of them evolve at a rate in the order of 10(−3) substitutions per site per year (s/n/y). This is approximately a million times faster than the rates of evolution of cellular host organisms, typically around 10(−9) s/n/y.” No mean achievement. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215000549 View in LinkedIn

EARLY DAYS. "We still have a limited ability to interpret how genetic variants alter gene regulation. We do not know how to “read the genome” and predict gene regulatory outputs. Our understanding of regulatory mechanisms and biochemical interactions has not yet matured into an ability to “read the code” and fully model transcriptional regulation." https://lnkd.in/dFv6Tsi View in LinkedIn

OPEN ISSUES. "For instance, what types of functional elements in DNA, RNA, or proteins are most often affected by regulatory variants? Which stages of gene regulation are typically altered? How can we predict which variants are most likely to impact regulation in a given cell type?" https://lnkd.in/dFv6Tsi View in LinkedIn

NONCODING REGULATORY VARIANTS. "It is now well established that noncoding regulatory variants play a central role in the genetics of common diseases and in evolution. However, until recently, we have known little about the mechanisms by which most regulatory variants act." https://lnkd.in/dFv6Tsi View in LinkedIn

EPIGENETICS AND NOVELTY. “Our results suggest that DNA methylation may play an important role in the origination and survival of MULE-derived genes through modulation of their stability and expression, which might be a general mechanism for all the TE-derived genes, thereby contributing to the evolution of gene novelty.” (MULEs = Mutator-like transposable elements; TE = transposable element). https://lnkd.in/dPzCkty View in LinkedIn

EPIGENETIC LINKS. “We showed that the methylation level in three cytosine contexts of MULE internal sequences increases and that the CHH context of MULE TIRs decreases over evolutionary time. This result implies that genic-MULEs which acquired potentially functional coding sequences and were maintained in the multiple Oryza species over millions of years might acquire epigenetic marks in their internal and TIR sequences that are needed to maintain their stability in the genome.” (MULEs = Mutator-like transposable elements; TIR = terminated inverted repeats). http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0954-8 View in LinkedIn

MICRO-RNAs AND VERTEBRATES. "The emergence of vertebrates is characterized by a strong increase in miRNA families. MicroRNAs interact broadly with many transcripts, and the evolution of such a system is intriguing. Compared with protein coding genes, miRNA genes are more dynamic in terms of emergence and decay." (miRNA = microRNA). https://lnkd.in/dat5Xys View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY SEQUENCES. "Another class of regulatory RNAs, small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), are known to be related to TEs. Interestingly, this has been pointed out as a distinction between miRNAs and siRNAs, which are closely related in terms of structure, function, and biogenesis." (TE = transposable elements; miRNA = microRNA). http://www.genetics.org/content/176/2/1323 View in LinkedIn

MOST RAPIDLY EVOLVING. "TEs are ubiquitous and abundant genomic sequences. Since TEs tend to be among the most rapidly evolving of all genomic sequences, they may also provide a mechanism for the emergence of lineage-specific miRNA genes that could exert diversifying regulatory effects. many studies have identified a variety ways in which TEs have been domesticated to provide functions to their hosts." (TE = transposable elements; miRNA = microRNA). http://www.genetics.org/content/176/2/1323 View in LinkedIn

A million bottles a minute: world's plastic binge 'as dangerous as climate change' https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other View in LinkedIn