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SURPRISING SIMILARITY. "Comparing the quantity of DNA in microorganisms, plants, and animals shows that there is a remarkable similarity in size of the contributions, within two orders of magnitude. This similarity is surprising, given that prokaryotes evolved at least 3 billion years before plants and animals. The likely reason for this is the larger genome size in eukaryotes." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

IMPACT OF EXTINCTIONS. "Although statistics such as the destruction of 75% of life at the end-Cretaceous boundary are impressive, the true importance of this to the biosphere’s information content and processing power would depend on the genome sizes of extinct organisms, what influence the extinction had on microbial populations, and the effects on DNA transcription rates (altered by changed metabolic states in a stressed biosphere)." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

MASS EXTINCTIONS. "An information-based view of the biosphere may provide a way to consider the changing complexity of the biosphere through time. For example, mass extinctions can be considered to be similar to physical hard drive damage in a computer." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR SOPHISTICATION or baggage? View in LinkedIn

VAST AMOUNT OF GLOBAL GENETIC DATA. "Storing the total amount of information encoded in DNA in the biosphere, 5.3 × 10(31) megabases (Mb), would require approximately 10(21) supercomputers with the average storage capacity of the world’s four most powerful supercomputers." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

DNA EDITING is a critical part of replication for non-virus or non-bacterial swarm lifestyles. If the replicated genetic information contains errors from the process, these errors in the genetic code will often have serious or lethal consequences. And given the frequency and speed of DNA replication, highly efficient proof-reading is necessary. With increased molecular sophistication comes the need for another layer of complexity. The eukaryotic dilemma. View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION STORED IN HUMAN GENOME. "Instead of describing each cell as a 1.5 Gb parcel, it would be more useful to think of each cell as containing 1.5 Gb of “core” code with much more than 1.5 Gb of data (~35 million histones, each with 8 subunits, and each subunit with likely a thousand unique states) that represents the current active state of the code." http://bitesizebio.com/8378/how-much-information-is-stored-in-the-human-genome/ View in LinkedIn

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS for the differences in mutation rate between RNA and DNA viruses include: Genetic hitchhiking, selection for fast replication, antiredundancy selection, and evolution of neutral networks. Excellent summary. https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn

PLASTIC BOTTLE BAN View in LinkedIn

DNA VIRUS PROOFREADING KNOCKOUTS. "This apparent contradiction can be solved by noting that in RNA viruses, genetic information is even more compressed than it is in DNA viruses, because replication and transcription are biochemically equivalent, often catalyzed by a common molecular complex, and, in the case of positive-stranded RNA viruses, based on the same RNA molecule."" " https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn