2016 September - 15 articles
Gene duplication followed by mutation is a classic mechanism of neofunctionalization, producing gene families with functional diversity. In some cases, a single point mutation is sufficient to change the substrate specificity and/or the chemistry per...
Increasing evidence suggests that bdelloid rotifers regularly undergo horizontal gene transfer, apparently as a surrogate mechanism of genetic exchange in the absence of true sexual reproduction, in part because of their ability to withstand desiccat...
Halophilic archaea experience high levels of ultraviolet (UV) light in their environments and demonstrate resistance to UV irradiation. DNA repair systems and carotenoids provide UV protection but do not account for the high resistance observed. Here...
Francis Crick (Figure 1) was born on 8 June 1916, in Northampton, England, and passed away on 28 July 2004, in La Jolla, California, USA.[...]
In recent years, biodiesel, a substitute for fossil fuels, has led to the excessive production of crude glycerol. The resulting crude glycerol can possess a high concentration of salts and an alkaline pH. Moreover, current crude glycerol purification...
Facts concerning the stability and functioning of key biomolecular components suggest that cellular life should no longer be viable above a few thousand atmospheres (200–300 MPa). However, organisms are seen to survive in the laboratory to much highe...
We propose that the first step in the origin of cellular life on Earth was the self-assembly of fatty acids with the building blocks of RNA and protein, resulting in a stable aggregate. This scheme provides explanations for the selection and concentr...
Gene duplication is an important mechanism of molecular evolution. It offers a fast track to modification, diversification, redundancy or rescue of gene function. However, duplication may also be neutral or (slightly) deleterious, and often ends in p...
The existence of multiple copies of genes is a well-known phenomenon. A gene family is a set of sufficiently similar genes, formed by gene duplication. In earlier works conducted on a limited number of completely sequenced and annotated genomes it wa...
Haloferax volcanii AglM and Halobacterium salinarum VNG1048G are UDP-glucose dehydrogenases involved in N-glycosylation in each species. Despite sharing >60% sequence identity and the ability of VNG1048G to functionally replace AglM in vivo, these...
RNA played a central role in the emergence of the first life-like system on primitive Earth since RNA molecules contain both genetic information and catalytic activity. However, there are several drawbacks regarding the RNA world hypothesis. Here, I...
The endoergic nature of protein and nucleic acid assembly in aqueous media presents two questions that are fundamental to the understanding of life’s origins: (i) how did the polymers arise in an aqueous prebiotic world; and (ii) once formed in some...
The abundance of mammalian long intergenic non-coding RNA (lincRNA) genes is high, yet their functions remain largely unknown. One possible way to study this important question is to use large-scale comparisons of various characteristics of lincRNA w...
The mystery of the origin of life can be divided into two parts. The first part is the origin of biomolecules: under what physicochemical conditions did biomolecules such as amino acids, nucleotides, and their polymers arise? The second part of the m...
Life on Earth provides a unique biological record from single-cell microbes to technologically intelligent life forms. Our evolution is marked by several major steps or innovations along a path of increasing complexity from microbes to space-faring h...
