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INNOVATIVE BURSTS. "Substantial increase in protein complexity appears to be associated only with the onset of the evolution of the two kingdoms of multicellular eukaryotic organisms, plants, and animals." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

SIGMOID CURVE. "In fact, all cells can do is divide, produce products of differentiation, migrate or remain in place, and die, but the combination of these activities over the course of time are described by a curve. Remarkably, for the years between puberty and senescence, this curve for human beings parallels the Gompertzian exponential." https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/275818 View in LinkedIn

EUKARYOTE LOSSES. "Even more striking conclusions were reached by the reconstruction of the evolution of the eukaryotic protein domain repertoire that involved comparison of 114 genomes. The results of this reconstruction indicate that most of the major eukaryotic lineages have experienced a net loss of domains that have been traced to the LECA." (LECA = last eukaryotic common ancestor). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

NORMATIVE LITTLE DEATHS. "One can now list the number of times particular tissues are replaced in one year: lining of the small intestine; lining of the stomach; epidermal covering of the lips; hepatocytes of the liver; lining of the trachea; and lining of the bladder. And all this replacement is perfectly normal and not a consequence of trauma. Ultimately, biologists recognized the role of cells in death as well as life: a living thing dies when its cells no longer develop or maintain it." https://lnkd.in/dTkk9-R View in LinkedIn

WIDESPREAD LOSS. "Even animals and plants, the eukaryotic kingdoms that seem to be the least prone to gene loss, have lost about 20% of the putative ancestral genes identified in the unicellular Naegleria. Collectively, these findings imply that the genome of the LECA was at least as complex as the genomes of typical extant free-living unicellular eukaryotes." (LECA = last eukaryotic common ancestor). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

PATHWAY? "Death is not the waste of life it sometimes seems, but the pathway through which energy flows through virtual life and through its fractals." (Whatever that means). https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/275813 View in LinkedIn

SNAKES AND LADDERS. "Given the fractions of conserved and lineage-specific genes in modern archaeal genomes, this translates into approximately 2,500 genes in the ancestral genome, which is a larger genome than most of the extant archaea possess. The reconstructed pattern of gene loss and gain in archaea is non-trivial: there seems to have been some net gene gain at the base of each of the major archaeal branches that was almost invariably followed by substantial gene loss...this could be a general pattern of genome evolution." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

DEATH AS AN ADAPTATION TO LIFE. "Instead of imagining death as the antithesis of life, death must be appreciated as an evolving part of life and an adaptation to life." https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/275814 View in LinkedIn

ANOTHER EXEMPLAR. "The most compelling evidence of the dominance of genome reduction and simplification was obtained through the reconstruction of the genomic evolution of archaea that almost exclusively are free-living organisms. The latest ML reconstruction based on a comparative analysis of 120 archaeal genomes traced between 1,400 and 1,800 gene families to the last common ancestor of the extant archaea." (ML = maximum likelihood methods). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

CONSTRAINTS ON REDUCTIONS. "Certainly, the evolution of the genomes of parasites, symbionts and commensals is not a one-way path of reduction. On the contrary, the reduction ratchet is constrained by the advantages of retaining certain metabolic pathways that complement the host metabolism." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn