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MORPHOLOGICAL GENE MUTATIONS. "Mutations in regulatory regions were thus thought to be the main force for morphological evolution, as changes in gene regulation impacting timing and/or position of gene expression were likely to be better tolerated as a result of their more subtle effects in a restricted set of tissues during development." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

CONTROL OF MORPHOLOGICAL TRAITS. "Unlike biochemical or physiological traits, morphological traits are typically specified by genes that act upstream in major developmental pathways. As such, mutations in coding regions (‘functional’ mutations) were considered to incur sufficiently deleterious pleiotropy to be untenable for effecting morphological evolution." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

FIRST STEP. "Novel phenotypes arise as a result of a particular mutation or combination of mutations becoming fixed in a population, but, in order for this to occur, the genetic change must first be tolerated by the developing organism and be inherited by its offspring." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

LOGICAL STRATEGY. "Within a population, morphological change can occur via divergence in regulatory genes, leading to variation in gene expression, and thus the extrapolation to morphological evolution proceeding via diversification in regulatory loci provides a logical foundation for investigating the genetics underlying developmental evolution." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

"VIROPHAGES are small viruses that eat other larger viruses, and are a type of Satellite Virus that needs the presence of another virus to flourish. Virophages include the Spitnik virophage, and the Marvirus virophage (aka Maverick), both found in water-cooling towers in Paris and the UK." Definately strange creatures. https://lnkd.in/djXb4Ng View in LinkedIn

FASTER EVOLUTION. "Accelerated rates of regulatory gene evolution have been shown to accompany rapid morphological diversification in adaptive radiations, demonstrating a link between morphological and genetic diversification in regulatory regions of developmental genes." https://lnkd.in/dD4GcAS View in LinkedIn

STANDARD ASSUMPTIONS. "When scientists think about the replication of information in chemistry, they usually have in mind something akin to what happens in living organisms when DNA gets copied." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION OF INFORMATION. "The key to the origins of life is the replication of information. Linear polymers such as nucleic acids that both carry information and can be replicated are currently what we consider to be the basis of living systems." https://lnkd.in/drTPyYN View in LinkedIn

GENOTYPE + PHENOTYPE = BEHAVIOR. "Once Nature had the capacity to synthesize information-bearing macromolecules though, the stochasticity of the system became embodied into the “behavior” of the molecules because now there was the possibility that a molecule was the system! In essence, a system requires both a genotype and a phenotype to be able to display behavior." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

PREBIOTIC CHEMISTRY. "The formose reaction is both notoriously complex and has the feature of autocatalysis, making it of prebiotic importance. It is in fact the best known example of a self-organized chemical cycle that bears on the origins of life but is absent of genetic material." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn