Month: September 2022

DORMANCY AS A MERISTEM STATE. "We reconsider seasonal cycles of growth and dormancy in view of a new definition of dormancy as a state within the meristem, together with recent exciting developments in the study of perennials, particularly the identification of common signalling intermediates between flowering time and growth cessation in trees." https://lnkd.in/dgbUNyw View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this last section on plant dormancy phenomena and mechanisms. Our understanding of plants remains quite rudimentary, despite the genetic and biochemical tools available today, and huge questions still remain unresolved. But we only invented printing 500 years ago, so we are just at the beginning. View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE of life includes viruses, prions, transposable elements (jumping genes) and of course, the evolution of life from non-life. This represents the transition from chemistry to biology and everything in between. View in LinkedIn

REPRODUCTION. "What about prions? They’re even smaller and simpler than viruses or viroids. They’re misshapen strands of protein that can somehow cause neighboring proteins to bend out of shape themselves." https://lnkd.in/ddwhRte View in LinkedIn

INFECTIOUS PARTICLES. "Prions are proteins, but they are proteins that are not behaving properly. This is because their normal three-dimensional shape has changed, and they can no longer do their job. But not only can they not do their job, but they actual cause damage to the cells. But what is surprising to researchers about prions is that prions are infectious -- they can make more proteins have the wrong three-dimensional shape, spreading the damage they do." https://lnkd.in/e3zZDuE View in LinkedIn

CONTRARIAN. "Prions are mostly protein. Although protein is a fundamental component of living cell material, prions are not alive. The behave something like viruses, without DNA or RNA yet able to reproduce by forcing living cells to do the reproduction for them." https://lnkd.in/eR_TbTu View in LinkedIn

EVOLVING PRIONS. "Like the role of proteins in epigenetics (adaptation or change in gene expression not caused by DNA), the more molecular biologists dig into proteins the more versatile and important they become. New research shows that includes the ability of prions to evolve." https://lnkd.in/eR_TbTu View in LinkedIn

EVOLVING COMPUTER CODE. "Some have argued that neither the geological timescales nor the large populations that are germane to biological evolution will be available to evolving computer malware. However, generation times for computer viruses are many orders of magnitude shorter than even bacterial generation times, and furthermore selective pressures are expected to be much stronger and mutation rates higher, speeding up evolution." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

ADAPTING PRIONS. "A new study, carried out by the Scripps Research Institute, started with the notion that perhaps prions could become resistant to drugs through selective adaptation (i.e. evolution)." https://lnkd.in/eR_TbTu View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION WITHOUT DNA. "Prions – the infectious proteins behind mad cow disease, CJD and kuru – are capable of Darwinian evolution, all without a single strand of DNA or its sister molecule RNA." https://lnkd.in/dVZWBhV View in LinkedIn