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AMBIENT FACTORS. "Recreating the circuit on another identical system makes it fail, so apparently it relies on quirks and imperfections in the transistors to function. No human would ever design a circuit this way." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

UNEXPECTED RESULT. "A computer is programmed to build random circuits and run tests on them to complete a certain task. The best performing circuits are randomly combined into hybrids and tested again. After hundreds of generations the evolved circuit performs the task really well. The researchers thought this would provide insight on more efficient circuit design, but the circuit that evolved was so bizarre they couldn't even understand how it was doing the task." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

MESSY CREATIVITY. "About a 100 million repetitions of this game later, the software came up with a wiring pattern that would create a circuit board (computer chip) that was really pretty good. The layout made no sense to humans just looking at it, because neat & tidy aren't important to the program - like the filing system of a messy bureaucrat with no local supervisor." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this meditation on the development of innovation from disordered regions of proteins. The key is promiscuous binding, creating binding hubs which can multiply enormously when connected, as the drawing shows. But with disorder comes also the price of verging towards chaos, the unwanted protein pairings that lead to diseases. https://lnkd.in/dijcJxP View in LinkedIn

DISEASE ASSOCIATIONS. "Proteins with long intrinsically disordered segments have been associated with several human disease conditions. For instance, overexpression of the intrinsically disordered Stathmin has been linked to cancer, whereas the overexpression of tau, ataxin-1, α-synuclein and huntingtin is associated with various neurodegenerative disorders." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn

COSTS. "However, the use of promiscuity does not come without a cost: a number of diseases that have been associated with intrinsically disordered-containing proteins seem to be caused by undesirable interactions occurring upon altered expression of the intrinsically disordered-containing protein." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn

FUNCTION OF PROMISCUOUS ID SEGMENTS. "Their use in assembling dynamic, macromolecular structures, their role as interaction switches in regulation and signalling, and their role as recognition elements in the PQC (protein quality control) system." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn

INTER- AND INTRADIGM-MODULARITY. "Patil et al., concluded that transient hubs are more likely to interact intermodularly, allowing communication between different modules (a module simply being a highly interconnected process, like the transcription initiation machinery), whereas the stable hubs are more likely to interact intramodularly, allowing for the formation of the modules." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn

HUB GROUPINGS. "Numerous studies have broken the hub proteins into two separate categories: those that form simultaneous stable complexes with their many interaction partners (party/multi-interface/stable hubs), and those that interact transiently with their partners at separate times (date/singlish-interface/transient hubs). Of these two hub types, only the transiently interacting hubs were found to be enriched in disorder." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn

DISORDER CONCENTRATION. "Hubs have higher levels of disorder than non-hubs." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn