Category: Uncategorized

REPLICATION ENERGY. "Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

ENTROPY AND SELF-REPLICATION. "Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy." https://lnkd.in/dHBaHDW View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR SALTATIONS. "Under Tkachenko and Maslov's model, the move from monomers to polymers is a very sudden one. It's also hysteretic -- that is, it takes a very certain set of conditions to make the initial leap from monomers to self-replicating polymers, but those stringent requirements are not necessary to maintain a system of self-replicating polymers once one has leapt over the first hurdle." https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

CRAWLING OUT OF THE SOUP. "What we have demonstrated for the first time is that even if all you have is template-assisted ligation, you can still bootstrap the system out of primordial soup." https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR TRAIT SELECTION. "Directed evolution has proved to be an effective strategy for improving or altering the activity of biomolecules for industrial, research and therapeutic applications. The evolution of proteins in the laboratory requires methods for generating genetic diversity and for identifying protein variants with desired properties." https://lnkd.in/dwR3hCZ View in LinkedIn

POLYMERIZATION CYCLES. "Tkachenko and Maslov have proposed a new model that shows how the earliest self-replicating molecules could have worked. Their model switches between "day" phases, where individual polymers float freely, and "night" phases, where they join together to form longer chains via template-assisted ligation. The phases are driven by cyclic changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, pH, or salinity, which throw the system out of equilibrium and induce the polymers to either come together or drift apart." https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC DNA. "From the moment life gained a foothold on Earth the diversity of organisms has been written in a DNA code of four letters. The latest study moves life beyond G, T, C and A – the molecules or bases that pair up in the DNA helix – and introduces two new letters of life: X and Y." https://lnkd.in/eKdazAS View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC DNA INHERITED. "The first living organism to carry and pass down to future generations an expanded genetic code has been created by American scientists, paving the way for a host of new life forms whose cells carry synthetic DNA that looks nothing like the normal genetic code of natural organisms." https://lnkd.in/eKdazAS View in LinkedIn

SIX LETTER CODE. "These data provide direct evidence, the first for any artificially expanded genetic information system, that a LIVE experiment can explore substantial fractions of sequence space in a six letter genetic system." https://lnkd.in/dinaF2C View in LinkedIn

FIRST SYNTHETIC DNA LIFE. "Thus, the resulting bacterium is the first organism to propagate stably an expanded genetic alphabet." https://lnkd.in/dTaWawu View in LinkedIn