Year: 2022

PHAGE MATH. "There may be as many as 10(30) tailed phage globally. For people who like their numbers written out, that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If you were to gather them all up and weigh them, they would outweigh the world population of elephants by a thousand-fold or more." https://lnkd.in/eBxpUF7 View in LinkedIn

GUT MICROBIOME. "You are going to see people manipulating individual bacteria species in someone’s gut with a bacteriophage before too long, because it’s not very hard to do." The gut Microbiome is the target of future therapies for a wide range of disorders. It's all about gut ecology and balance. Watch this space. https://lnkd.in/eaHyvSK View in LinkedIn

EXOGENES. "The capture and functional assimilation of exogenous viral genes may represent an important force in the evolution of eukaryotes." http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/11/276/ View in LinkedIn

EXOGENOME. "Genes that encode products with exogenous targets, which comprise an organism's “exogenome,” typically exhibit high rates of evolution." https://lnkd.in/eNmH993 View in LinkedIn

EXAPTATION "is a term used in evolutionary biology to describe a trait that has been co-opted for a use other than the one for which natural selection has built it." Darwin first conceived the idea. http://www.livescience.com/39688-exaptation.html View in LinkedIn

EXAPTATION EXAMPLES. "Hosts infected by viruses found new uses for the genetic material the agents of disease left behind; metabolic enzymes somehow came to refract light rays through the eye’s lens; mammals took advantage of the sutures between the skull bones to help their young pass through the birth canal; and, in the signature example, feathers appeared in fossils before the ancestors of modern birds took to the skies." https://lnkd.in/ehYPdVy View in LinkedIn

MORE FUNCTIONALITY. "In 2012, a research program called the ENCODE project concluded that around three quarters of the noncoding DNA in the human genome did undergo transcription and that almost 50% of the genome was available to the proteins involved in genetic regulation such as transcription factors." https://lnkd.in/eZHPYqA View in LinkedIn

NON-CODING DNA IS VIRAL. "New research has shown that these non-coding repetitive sequences originated primarily from retroviral RNA. In this way, thousands of endogenous retroviral sequences have been integrated into the human genome, with 22 independent retroviral families currently having been identified." https://lnkd.in/e-pJFM6 View in LinkedIn

NON-CODING DNA IMPLICATED IN TYPE II DIABETES. "Our studies illustrate how islet transcription factors interact functionally with the epigenome and provide systematic evidence that the dysregulation of islet enhancers is relevant to the mechanisms underlying type 2 diabetes." https://lnkd.in/ehcd6t4 View in LinkedIn

CRUCIAL JUNK. "For decades, non-coding regions of the genome have been ignored or declared as ‘‘junk’’-DNA. Even the non-coding, repetitive DNA sequences which were interpreted as being ancient remnants of former evolutionary stages are now recognized as being of viral descent and crucial for higher-order regulatory and constitutional functions of protein structural vocabulary." https://lnkd.in/e-pJFM6 View in LinkedIn