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MOST PSEUDOGENES "are simply evolving without selective constraints on their sequences and likely have no function" (that is yet known!). http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

SONG OF DARWIN. "The more I study nature, the more I become impressed […] that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations [acquired through natural selection] transcend in an incomparable degree [those] which the most fertile imagination of the most imaginative man could suggest with unlimited time at his disposal." https://lnkd.in/eykUy37 View in LinkedIn

EXAPTATION. "Some pseudogenes have been co-opted for organism-level function." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for the next two weekends deals with the stunning emergence of flowering plants (angiosperms) on this planet. This event changed terrestrial biodiversity forever. This group is dominant, richly diverse, and very successful. Flowers, it turns out, are all about sexual recombination of genes. The genetic basis of this sudden event appears related to gene duplication. Rethink these remarkable creatures. View in LinkedIn

PSEUDOGENES. "The human genome is also home to a large number of pseudogenes. Estimates of the total number range from 12,600 to 19,700." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

THE ROOT OF THE CASE FOR JUNK DNA. "There are unambiguous examples of nonprotein-coding sequences of various types having been co-opted for organism-level functions in gene regulation, chromosome structure, and other roles, but at present evidence from the published literature suggests that these represent a small minority of the human genome." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

PSEUDOGENES ARISE BY (2): "retrotransposition - reverse transcription of an mRNA transcript with subsequent re-integration of the cDNA into the genome. Such copies of genes are termed processed pseudogenes. These pseudogenes can also accumulate random disablements over the course of evolution." http://pseudogene.org/background.php View in LinkedIn

MOBILE ELEMENTS. "The majority of human DNA consists of repetitive, mutationally degraded sequences." Chew on that one. http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

ESSENTIAL GENES WITH NO FUNCTION. "The crux of the story is this: an astonishing number of the genes added to Syn 3.0 at the behest of their computer model, while apparently essential for life, have no known function. Their final genome had exactly 473 genes in it, and a whopping 149 of these are currently mysterious." Not no function, just none yet known. Syn 3.0 was a minimal genome creation. https://lnkd.in/eJEhicj View in LinkedIn

SOBERING STATE OF AFFAIRS. "The Stanford-NIST team found that, on average, about a fifth of each of the 56 disease-related genes flagged by ACMG is situated outside well-characterized, high-confidence regions of the NIST reference genome." https://lnkd.in/emhRZgK View in LinkedIn