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MOONLIGHTING FUNCTIONS. "Certain members of the ATP-grasp and cupin superfamilies lack (known) enzymatic activities and act solely as ATP-binding (synapsin), auxin-binding, or seed storage proteins. Many enzymes acquire such additional (typically non-enzymatic) functions even without the loss of their catalytic activity. This phenomenon, referred to as “moonlighting", is usually observed when the respective genes are expressed in atypical environments (tissue, cell organelle, or secreted)." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

AMOEBA. "Although developing software by self-replication, evolution and natural selection sounds like science fiction, Amoeba has already demonstrated the remarkable fact that in the digital world, order can indeed arise out of chaos. Ironic, perhaps, when our experience with today's software is often quite the reverse." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

METABOLIC PLASTICITY. "It has been shown that many key biochemical steps can be catalyzed by two or more diverse, often unrelated enzyme forms, a phenomenon known as non-orthologous gene displacement." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

UNRELATED PLAYERS. "Comparative genomics revealed a surprising flexibility of the key metabolic pathways, including numerous biochemical reactions catalyzed by highly diverged or previously uncharacterized enzyme forms." https://lnkd.in/d59Qmdd View in LinkedIn

WHY SO COMPLEX? "Metabolic pathways may seem arbitrary and unnecessarily complex. In many cases, a chemist might devise a simpler route for the biochemical transformation, so why has nature chosen such complex solutions?" https://lnkd.in/dvz872D View in LinkedIn

MODULAR MOLECULAR MACHINE. "Here is the beauty of the transcription-translation machine; it is a modular arrangement of proteins whose core functioning units are repeated over and over again in various transcriptional factors, each of which has specific receptor sites that recognize one another and recognize the steroid-bound protein that initiates the transcription at the specific gene on the DNA." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

SMALL NUMBERS GIVE RISE TO BIG NUMBERS. "Although the panorama of interactions of natural products with cellular targets is vast, the number of fundamental mechanisms for these interactions is limited." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

MISSING PATHWAYS. "Cells first appeared on earth over 3.5 billion years ago and remained in the unicellular state for some 2.5 billion years. Much of the cellular machinery of today's prokaryotes is believed to have been in place very early, although we have no direct knowledge of this." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

MISSING AGENTS. "To further complicate matters, some complex systems appear to require initial conditions or agents that have long disappeared from the system but were necessary for the system to evolve to its present state -- such situations are common for ecosystems." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

GREATER THAN THE SUM. "The hallmark of these systems is that...they are not fully explained by an understanding of their component parts, i.e., they seem not to be readily analyzed by reductionist processes." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn