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PLANETARY COMPUTING POWER. "If all the DNA in the biosphere was being transcribed at these reported rates, taking an estimated transcription rate of 30 bases per second, then the potential computational power of the biosphere would be approximately 10(15) yottaNOPS (yotta = 10(24)), about 10(22) times more processing power than the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which has a processing power on the order of 10(5) teraFLOPS (tera = 10(12))." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK 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

RNA VS DNA VIRUSES. "A major challenge for understanding the evolution of mutation rates is the question of why DNA and RNA viruses, which apparently share similar lifestyles, show such different mutation rates...RNA viruses have elevated mutation rates because this confers increased adaptability, then why do DNA viruses maintain proofreading mechanisms?" https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this fragment from nature featuring a lively paper about the amount of global DNA as a way of looking at biodiversity. Quite charming. And one perspective is that life appears to have been driven in part to accumulate genetic information in the form of DNA, and this information is liberally shared among the planet's inhabitants. It's all about information. View in LinkedIn

FUTURE PROSPECTS. "We might also wonder about the future computational power of the biosphere. In the next billion years or more, will the information content or the computational speed increase, and how will they be distributed amongst the major domains and subgroups of life?" https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

DNA IN BIOMASS. "The DNA is incorporated within approximately 2 × 10(12) tonnes of biomass and approximately 5 × 10(30) living cells, the latter dominated by prokaryotes." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

"NEW GENES provide the raw material for evolutionary innovation that allows organisms to adapt, increase in complexity, and form new species. An organism can acquire new genes through at least three distinct, but potentially overlapping, mechanisms." https://lnkd.in/e3rTkFh View in LinkedIn

MISSING DATA. "Despite impressive advances in molecular biology and genome sequencing of species, our analysis emphasises that we still lack very fundamental data about the biomass of different types of life on Earth and their distribution, which is essential for refining estimates of the information content of the biosphere." A very, very long way to go. https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

TOTAL GLOBAL BIOMASS. "Although the cell numbers in eukaryotes are approximately two to five orders of magnitude lower than the number of prokaryotes (animals by biome: 4.11606 × 10(25) cells; animals by biomass: 1.28907 × 10(26) cells; plants: 2.44730 × 10(28) cells, compared to prokaryotes: 5 × 10(30) cells, the average genome size in prokaryotes is 3.2147 Mb, compared to the higher value in plants (5,958 Mb) and animals (4,456 Mb)." https://lnkd.in/ewABXeK View in LinkedIn

CELL CYCLE ORDER. "This is accomplished by delaying the entry into the next phase until the risk factors (such as DNA damage in G1/S/G2 phase, spindle abnormality prior to anaphase, etc.) are removed. Another important function of cell cycle checkpoint is to effectively trigger some processes (e.g. apoptosis, mitotic catastrophe, and senescence) to eliminate the severely damaged or high risk cells from the dividing pool." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1535610803000278 View in LinkedIn