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LEAP FORWARD. “The carpel, or female reproductive organ enclosing the ovules, is one of the major evolutionary innovations of the flowering plants. The carpel was undoubtedly a major factor in the evolutionary success of the angiosperms, which diversified from a common ancestor that is estimated to have lived in the Late Jurassic period, around 160 million years ago (MYA), to form approximately 300 000 species alive today.” https://lnkd.in/dA_5ryA View in LinkedIn

BLACK BOX. “Our goal is to know the function of every gene so we can develop a complete model of how a cell works. But that goal has not been reached yet. Of the seven genes added to this organism for normal cell division, scientists know what only two of them do. The roles that the other five play in cell division are not yet known.” Craig Venter team scores again with a minimal cell. https://lnkd.in/d-m72ta View in LinkedIn

POTENTIAL HUGENESS. “The existence of wandering IMBHs in high-mass galaxies will create a reservoir of IMBH-SMBH mergers waiting to happen. While some IMBHs will have dynamical friction timescales longer than a Hubble time, others will have orbits that decay and bring them into the centers of their hosts.” (IMBHs = intermediate mass black holes; SMBH = supermassive black holes). https://lnkd.in/dYX7TQV View in LinkedIn

METABOLIC SAMPLE. “The resulting scope of this seed set consists of a fully connected network of 315 reactions and 260 metabolites, the composition of which is robust to variations of the seed set compounds.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

SEED SET. “Importantly, the set of seed molecules we defined contains simple carboxylic acids in the form of acetate and formate, which could be provided by either an abiotic mechanism or a primitive pathway for carbon fixation (e.g., a primitive variant of the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway or the reductive TCA cycle.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

LEGO BLOCKS. “Network expansion was performed with a seed set of eight compounds thought to have been available in prebiotic environments, notably lacking phosphate.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

THE ALGORITHM. “The algorithm adds metabolites and reactions to an initial seed set, iteratively asking whether any new reaction could take place given the available substrates, until convergence to a final set of reactions and metabolites (or “scope”).” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

STARTING BLOCKS. “To this end we adopted the network expansion algorithm, which simulates the emergence of metabolic networks from a predefined set of compounds.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

SEARCH PARAMETERS. “We started by searching for regions of global metabolism that could be accessible starting from simple molecules likely to have been geochemically abundant on early Earth.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

OVERCOMING BOTTLENECKS. “Statistical analysis of the physiochemical properties of enzymes within this network show an enrichment for iron-sulfur and transition metal coenzymes. By broadening our analysis of protometabolism with the inclusion of different types of coenzyme precursor couplings, we further show that thioesters, rather than phosphate, could have enabled this core metabolism to overcome energetic bottlenecks, supporting the feasibility of a metabolically rich thioester-based early biochemistry.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn