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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

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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

PLANETARY COMPUTING POWER. "If all the DNA in the biosphere was being transcribed at these reported rates, taking an estimated transcription rate of 30 bases per second, then the potential computational power of the biosphere would be approximately 10(15) yottaNOPS (yotta = 10(24)), about 10(22) times more processing power than the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which has a processing power on the order of 10(5) teraFLOPS (tera = 10(12))." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

PROOFREADING IN DNA VIRUSES. " It is well known that DNA polymerases can be fully functional without 3′→5′ exonuclease activity, and hence, a DNA virus carrying a loss-of-function mutation should benefit from faster adaptation, eventually displacing strains with proofreading ability." https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn

RNA VS DNA VIRUSES. "A major challenge for understanding the evolution of mutation rates is the question of why DNA and RNA viruses, which apparently share similar lifestyles, show such different mutation rates...RNA viruses have elevated mutation rates because this confers increased adaptability, then why do DNA viruses maintain proofreading mechanisms?" https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this fragment from nature featuring a lively paper about the amount of global DNA as a way of looking at biodiversity. Quite charming. And one perspective is that life appears to have been driven in part to accumulate genetic information in the form of DNA, and this information is liberally shared among the planet's inhabitants. It's all about information. View in LinkedIn

FUTURE PROSPECTS. "We might also wonder about the future computational power of the biosphere. In the next billion years or more, will the information content or the computational speed increase, and how will they be distributed amongst the major domains and subgroups of life?" https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

INTEGRITY OF INHERITANCE. "A fundamental aspect of life lies in maintaining the integrity of the genome, ensuring the correct inheritance of the genetic information." https://lnkd.in/eNytTdX View in LinkedIn