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UNKNOWN HITCHHIKERS. "20% of a nasal swab contains DNA sequences that are completely unknown to science today. In the gut this biological dark matter is 40-50%." https://itunes.com/apps/tedconferences/ted View in LinkedIn

"VIRUSES contain more genetic information than all of life in this planet." (Nathan Wolfe). https://itunes.com/apps/tedconferences/ted View in LinkedIn

PENALTY BOX. “Massive regain of inbreeding depression, particularly following hybridization events, may be a necessary prerequisite for reversals to partial or complete outcrossing.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12182/full View in LinkedIn

VIRAL IMPACT ON OUR EVOLUTION." Viruses were directly involved in differentiating our lineage from the chimpanzee lineage. Viruses were involved in all the major evolutionary transitions." (Professor Lluis Villarreal). This includes the evolution of the mammalian placenta. https://youtu.be/3Ms04x6MvMY View in LinkedIn

SELFING TO OUTCROSSING. “The conditions for reversal to outcrossing are the opposite of those for the evolution of selfing.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12182/full View in LinkedIn

VIRAL DARK MATTER. "We mined publicly available bacterial and archaeal genomic data sets to identify 12,498 high-confidence viral genomes linked to their microbial hosts. These data augment public data sets 10-fold, provide first viral sequences for 13 new bacterial phyla including ecologically abundant phyla, and help taxonomically identify 7–38% of ‘unknown’ sequence space in viromes." https://elifesciences.org/content/4/e08490 View in LinkedIn

PURGING AND DEPRESSION. “Because elevated homozygosity accompanying the evolution of selfing may effectively purge partially recessive, harmful mutations, inbreeding depression should correspondingly decline in response to increased selfing.” https://lnkd.in/dj9hK7n View in LinkedIn

MULTIPLE PHAGE PARASITES PER HOST. "∼35% of infected cells contained multiple viruses. Here, in the 5492 microbial genomes with detectable viral signal, nearly half (2445) contained more than one detectable virus. Most (∼82%) of these co-infections involved multiple Caudovirales, as previously observed, and likely provides mechanism for viral gene exchange and may be more common in some phages displaying rampant mosaicism." https://elifesciences.org/content/4/e08490 View in LinkedIn

NUMERICAL DISADVANTAGE. “By contrast, outcrossing individuals donate, on average, one copy as a seed parent (pollen for that seed having arrived from an outcrossing event with another individual) and another copy as a pollen parent. Inbreeding depression is usually invoked as the principal counterweight to this advantage.” https://lnkd.in/dj9hK7n View in LinkedIn

GREAT UNKNOWN. "More than 25,000 bacterial and archaeal host genomes are available in NCBI RefSeq (January 2015), whereas only 1,531 of their viruses were entirely sequenced and most (86%) of these derive from only 3 of 61 known host phyla. Thus, although advances in high-throughput sequencing expand the bounds of viral sequence space, these data sets are dominated by uncharacterized sequences (usually 60–95%), termed ‘viral dark matter’." https://elifesciences.org/content/4/e08490 View in LinkedIn