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HGT AND CANCER. "The American Cancer Society reports that 15-20% of cancers worldwide and 10% of cancers in developed countries are linked to viral, bacterial, or parasitic infections. Could this be another example of HGT by proto-oncogene disruption?" (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/eBQXvvd View in LinkedIn

CANCER represents a very bizarre cellular dysfunction, where a part of the body decides to rebel, to acquire genes in order to speed that rebellion, and increasingly acts like an autonomous cellular organization with an enormously high mutation rate. View in LinkedIn

SOME VIRUSES do cause diseases, but the most interesting examples are in oncology. While the focus of this thread is not to pathologize viruses, their role in cancer is rather remarkable. Other viral diseases are also very interesting. View in LinkedIn

MITOCHONDRIAL ORIGINS. "It is noteworthy that such a global replacement of cellular proteins by viral-encoded functional analogs actually occurred in the course of mitochondial evolution." https://lnkd.in/dNTbYMw View in LinkedIn

VIRAL DNA IN HUMAN GENOME. "Human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) proviruses comprise a significant part of the human genome, with approximately 98,000 ERV elements and fragments making up nearly 8%." Some infected human genomes at least 150,000 years ago. https://lnkd.in/dwG2wT9 View in LinkedIn

VIRUS TO EUKARYOTIC CELLS. "If DNA and DNA replication proteins originated in viruses, one can imagine that DNA replication mechanisms have been transferred from viruses to cells. Many protein phylogenies support the idea of ancient transfers of replicative proteins between cells and viruses." https://lnkd.in/dNTbYMw View in LinkedIn

OTHER FUNCTIONAL MUTATIONS. "As changes in the coding region, especially of transcription factors, can cause downstream changes within a GRN that result in spatial and/or temporal alterations in gene expression, a mutation does not have to be in a regulatory region to cause a heritable regulatory change. Thus, while regulatory changes in gene expression are a major factor in evodevo, these changes may be caused by different types of functional mutations." (GRN = gene regulatory network). https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

"THE REGULATORY HYPOTHESIS predicts that phenotypic evolution is, in most cases, associated with changes in gene expression. Unlike the more stringent cis-regulatory hypothesis championed by Carroll, the more general regulatory hypothesis makes no clear prediction about the molecular nature of the genetic changes underlying regulatory evolution (i.e. whether they are cis or trans), emphasizing only that regulation is key to developmental evolution." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

COMPARATIVE REGULATORY NETWORKS. "We argue that only by understanding the regulatory networks that underlie organismal form and function in a comparative context can we determine how developmental evolution can lead to adaptive changes in morphology." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

EVODEVO ADAPTIVE EVOLUTION. "We discuss how regulatory hypotheses of developmental evolution can be used to investigate the phenotypic changes associated with adaptive diversification, providing an evolutionary developmental biology (evodevo) approach for the study of adaptive evolution." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn