What is Life? Original Lecture series: (link opens pdf) My comment: Life is the link between atoms and healthy nutrient-dependent ecosystems, which are controlled by the physiology of reproduction in all living genera. Without the biophysically constrained chemistry of nutrient-dependent RNA-mediated gene duplication and the thermodynamic cycles of protein biosynthesis and degradation that link RNA-mediated … Dead-end theories about the cat
Scientists discover atomic-resolution details of brain signaling Excerpt: Both parts of this protein complex are essential… but until now it was unclear how its two pieces fit and work together. My comment: RNA-mediated amino acid substitutions are fixed in the organized genomes of all genera via the experience-dependent de novo creation of receptors. Receptors allow … Atomic-resolution of cell type signaling
Leaving an Imprint Among the first to discover epigenetic reprogramming during mammalian development, Wolf Reik has been studying the dynamics of the epigenome for 30 years. By Anna Azvolinsky | August 1, 2015 Excerpt: In the mammalian field, the imprinting field, together with the X-inactivation field, was the birthplace of epigenetics. My comment: Researchers like Wolf … Information and communication (2)
Intelligent Cancer Cells Communicate with Exosomes Excerpt: Human cells use thousands of different types of signals—cytokines, chemokines, neurotransmitters, gliatransmitters, peptides, protein factors, photons, mRNA, miRNA, lncRNA and many types of electricity (electrical synapses, calcium waves, axon spikes, protein gradients, electric fields, synchronous oscillations). Communication between cells occurs at many different levels at the same time. … Information and communication
Evolutionary Psychology Is Neither Excerpt any work that posits an adaptive explanation for a feature, but calls it an “evolutionary” approach – much less “the” evolutionary approach – is likely to be of greater value to the study of rhetoric or narrative in human evolution[9] than to the study of human evolution itself. My comment: … Unraveling evolutionary pseudoscience
Eibi Nevo: Evolution, Let’s Get It Right, It’s the “Basis of Everything” Excerpt: “The best we can know about origin of life may be from viruses we are looking at. They could have been at the origin of life before they parasitized it, or became symbionts in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. . . .” My comment: … Eibi Nevo gets it wrong
Introduction: A Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) is a DNA sequence variation in which a single nucleotide — A, T, C or G — in the genome (or other shared sequence) differs between members of a biological species or paired chromosomes. SNPs within a coding sequence do not necessarily change the amino acid sequence of the … Rs3827760 is Val370Ala and EDARV370A
Book recommendations: For non-technical representations of how nutritional epigenetics and pharmacogenomics are linked via ecological adaptations, see: In his 1985 science fiction novel, linked above, Greg Bear included everything that is currently known to serious scientists about RNA-mediated amino acid substitutions and cell type differentiation in species from microbes to humans. He indirectly addressed … From “Blood Music” to Evolution 2.0
Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics Eugene Koonin excerpt: The distribution of evolutionary rates across sets of orthologous genes, the distribution of the sizes of paralogous gene families, the negative correlation between the expression level and the sequence evolution rate of a gene, and other relationships between key evolutionary and phenomic variables seem to … Olfaction & the octopus and human genomes (2)
Secrets of the Deep: Scientists Sequence Genome of Octopus for First Time Excerpt: The genome was arranged differently than in other invertebrates and featured an expansion in a family of genes regulating nerve cell development that previously was thought to be enlarged only in vertebrates. My comment: RNA-mediated gene duplication and RNA-mediated amino acid substitutions … Olfaction & the octopus and human genomes
