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DAILY DEATH FOR HEALTH. "During embryonic development of the nervous system, the finger digits, or the ovary, but also in adult organisms, minutely regulated daily death processes maintain health and integrity." http://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcbc245/MCBC245PDFs/Jan31/Huettenbrenner2003.pdf View in LinkedIn

TELOMERE REPLENISHMENT. "Even one-celled organisms count replications, and will die if they don't replenish their telomeres with conjugation (sex)." https://lnkd.in/dUX_Fna View in LinkedIn

PREREQUISITES. "Cell-death programs as prerequisites of organized life." http://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcbc245/MCBC245PDFs/Jan31/Huettenbrenner2003.pdf View in LinkedIn

DEATH BY TELOMERE. "A second 'deliberate' mechanism is called replicative senescence or cellular senescence. Metaphorically, a cell may be said to 'count' (with its telomeres) the number of times that it has divided, and after a set number of replications, it languishes and dies. It has been proposed that this mechanism evolved to suppress cancer." https://lnkd.in/dUX_Fna View in LinkedIn

SELF-PURGING. "Cell death is not only employed to remove damaged or infected cells, but it is also important for sculpting tissues. During embryonic development, animals produce many cells which are no longer needed in the adult animal and which therefore undergo PCD to eliminate themselves." (PCD = programmed cell death). https://celldeath.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/lopezself_munoz.pdf View in LinkedIn

"BACTERIOPHAGE T4 consists of a head for protecting its genome and a sheathed tail for inserting its genome into a host. The tail terminates with a multiprotein baseplate that changes its conformation from a “high-energy” dome-shaped to a “low-energy” star-shaped structure during infection." https://lnkd.in/dmptCPC View in LinkedIn

BEAUTIFUL MOLECULAR STRUCTURES characterize phages. Check out the lovely illustrations in each of the cited publications. Nature is usually thought of as non-Euclidian. Without squares, circles, triangles and straight lines. Not in the world of viruses. View in LinkedIn

BRILLIANT ANIMATION of phage assembly. If anyone still uses the term "simple organisms" for bacteria and phages, please watch this animation. It is an engineer's nightmare of complexity. It even makes the human foot look relatively simple. And all controlled by different sets of genes that coordinate the assembly and activation. Clearly, a simple creature (not). https://lnkd.in/drFkmxq View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE examines the complex construction of bacteriophages (phages) that prey on bacteria, and how the structure changes dramatically when the phages become infectious. These are truly beautiful, geometrical and remarkable creatures that flip between the chemical and the living world with ease, and cause great consternation for (mostly) older taxonomists and biologists who assert that they are not living. And that they are simple. View in LinkedIn

CONSERVATION AND COMPLEXITY. "During the last nine years, homologues of genes involved in the regulation of programmed cell death in Caenorhabditis elegans have been identified in sponge, in Hydra vulgaris, in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster, in zebrafish, in mice and in humans. As frequently occurs during evolution, however, this striking conservation in both sequences and functional properties has been associated with a great level of diversification." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn