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HUMAN DNA STRING. "You have about 10 trillion cells in your body, so if you stretched the DNA in all the cells out, end to end, they'd stretch over 744 million miles. The moon is only about 250,000 miles away, so all your DNA would stretch to the moon and back almost 1500 times. The sun is 93,000,000 miles away, so your DNA would reach there and back about 4 times!" https://lnkd.in/efn84gu View in LinkedIn

PLANETARY LIFE INVENTORY. "Ms. Landenmark and her colleagues performed an exhaustive review of the number of microbes, plants, animals and fungi found on Earth. They also included viruses, because those agents play an important role in processing DNA and genes." https://lnkd.in/eUq6xFH View in LinkedIn

GENE NUMBERS. "The number of genes ranges from about 1000 in bacteria to more than 400,000 in many flowering plants. Each species consists of many organisms and virtually no two members of the same species are genetically identical." This kind of data is commonplace. But how many genes are there in the entire world? A harder nut to crack. https://lnkd.in/egvZAuQ View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE features a singular paper from 2015 by Hanna K. E. Landenmark a graduate student, and Professor Charles S Cockell, from the University of Edinburgh's United Kingdom Centre for Astrobiology, entitled "An Estimate of the Total DNA in the Biosphere". The sheer calculation gymnastics deserves being singled out for merit. It s also a novel way to measure diversity. Enjoy! View in LinkedIn

LARGE RNA VIRUS POPULATIONS. "Possible examples of such hypersensitivity include overlapping reading frames, haploidy, and the loss of systems for genome repair." The hypersensitivity from the absence of redundancy mechanisms due to genome streamlining and a minimal genetic repertoire. https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn

GENETIC STREAMLINING in large population microorganisms further complicates the need for high mutation rates as a consequence of the selective drive for rapid breeding cycles. http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v8/n8/full/ismej201460a.html View in LinkedIn

MASKING DELETERIOUS EFFECTS. "In small populations, such as those typical of most multicellular organisms, robustness evolves by masking the harmful effects of deleterious mutations, often by making certain functions redundant. Examples of such mechanisms include gene duplication, alternative metabolic pathways, or chaperone proteins that buffer against mutation-induced problems in other enzymes." https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn

POPULATION SIZE FACTOR. "Mutational robustness (i.e., the ability to preserve a constant phenotype despite the genomic mutational load) can be achieved by two distinct mechanisms, each operating at a different range of population sizes." (In RNA viruses). https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn

THE RACE FOR SPEED. "Did a high mutation rate emerge as a side effect of selection for faster replication? Biochemical assays of HIV-1 mutants resistant to nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors suggest that this might be the case" in RNA viruses. https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn

PROOFREADING IN DNA VIRUSES. " It is well known that DNA polymerases can be fully functional without 3′→5′ exonuclease activity, and hence, a DNA virus carrying a loss-of-function mutation should benefit from faster adaptation, eventually displacing strains with proofreading ability." https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn