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ALL ABOUT INFORMATION. "We define biological complexity as the genetic information that an organism has about its environment." https://lnkd.in/ejhFeVa View in LinkedIn

"COMPLEXITY is the study of the behaviour of large collections of simple, interacting units, endowed with the potential to evolve with time." https://lnkd.in/ecSgRXK View in LinkedIn

STARTLING FACT. "The human body carries out ~10,000 billion cell divisions in a lifetime." Each single division highly regulated by temporally variable constellations of vast numbers of genes. http://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2014/06/retroviruses-the-placenta-and-the-genomic-junk-drawer.html View in LinkedIn

INCOMPLETE HUMAN INTERACTOME. "Despite the clear value of having cell-type specific interactomes, so far no efforts have been launched to generate such a resource. Therefore, it remains unclear what the variations in the interactions of a given protein or functional module will be across different cell types and what this will tell us about the size of the human interactome." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925443914001562 View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE BEASTIES. "Several methods have aimed to calculate the total amount of interactions in an organism, which would help to estimate the coverage of the current data sets. In yeast different groups have arrived at estimates from 20,000 to 40,000 interactions among 6000 proteins." https://lnkd.in/ehe9rFY View in LinkedIn

SNAPSHOT. "Even considering only one splice variant per gene, approximately 20,000 protein-coding genes must be handled and ~200 million protein pairs tested to generate a comprehensive binary reference PPI map" (protein-protein interaction map)." https://lnkd.in/ekfTsQz View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE this weekend focuses on the subject of biological complexity. Too often, scientists are so engaged in the minutiae of their usually narrow investigations, that the bigger picture is forgotten, or fleetingly appreciated. It is hard to find career scientists engaged with big picture topics, and is an unfortunate consequence of our funding limitations. View in LinkedIn

WE ARE MOSAIC BEINGS. "Phages are the puppet masters; they insure that essential biochemical processes run smoothly." https://lnkd.in/eaHyvSK View in LinkedIn

"THE INDIVIDUAL UNIT in microbiology is not the cell; the primary unit is the organismal community. Cells develop in organismal community; they don’t give rise to them; the evolution of the cell takes place in the framework of this community. The individual organism more tightly coupled to the whole than we recognized." http://www.wired.com/2008/02/complexity-theo/ View in LinkedIn

LIVING AT THE BORDER. "They are all incredibly small; at just a few nanometres across, they lie on the border of measurability between quantum and classical physics, all but impossible to see without a scanning electron microscope. Like their hosts, phages are everywhere—in dirt, water, intestines, hot springs, Arctic ice cores." https://lnkd.in/eaHyvSK View in LinkedIn