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EXAPTATION. "Some pseudogenes have been co-opted for organism-level function." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for the next two weekends deals with the stunning emergence of flowering plants (angiosperms) on this planet. This event changed terrestrial biodiversity forever. This group is dominant, richly diverse, and very successful. Flowers, it turns out, are all about sexual recombination of genes. The genetic basis of this sudden event appears related to gene duplication. Rethink these remarkable creatures. View in LinkedIn

PSEUDOGENES. "The human genome is also home to a large number of pseudogenes. Estimates of the total number range from 12,600 to 19,700." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

THE ROOT OF THE CASE FOR JUNK DNA. "There are unambiguous examples of nonprotein-coding sequences of various types having been co-opted for organism-level functions in gene regulation, chromosome structure, and other roles, but at present evidence from the published literature suggests that these represent a small minority of the human genome." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

PSEUDOGENES ARISE BY (2): "retrotransposition - reverse transcription of an mRNA transcript with subsequent re-integration of the cDNA into the genome. Such copies of genes are termed processed pseudogenes. These pseudogenes can also accumulate random disablements over the course of evolution." http://pseudogene.org/background.php View in LinkedIn

MOBILE ELEMENTS. "The majority of human DNA consists of repetitive, mutationally degraded sequences." Chew on that one. http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

ESSENTIAL GENES WITH NO FUNCTION. "The crux of the story is this: an astonishing number of the genes added to Syn 3.0 at the behest of their computer model, while apparently essential for life, have no known function. Their final genome had exactly 473 genes in it, and a whopping 149 of these are currently mysterious." Not no function, just none yet known. Syn 3.0 was a minimal genome creation. https://lnkd.in/eJEhicj View in LinkedIn

SOBERING STATE OF AFFAIRS. "The Stanford-NIST team found that, on average, about a fifth of each of the 56 disease-related genes flagged by ACMG is situated outside well-characterized, high-confidence regions of the NIST reference genome." https://lnkd.in/emhRZgK View in LinkedIn

NINETY PERCENT. "Angiosperms, which originated ∼200 Ma, are the most recently diversifying major lineage of land plants. They underwent a rapid diversification, outcompeting and outnumbering other land plants to the point of representing nearly 90% (ca. 260,000 species) of all extant plant species and defining most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems since the mid-Cretaceous, ca. 100 Ma BP." https://lnkd.in/e_tsWZF View in LinkedIn

START OF BIODIVERSITY. "The revolutionary rise of broad-leaved (flowering) angiosperm plant species during the Cretaceous initiated a global ecological transformation towards modern biodiversity." https://lnkd.in/eytCiwA View in LinkedIn