Some time ago I had Fugu, or puffer fish, a highly poisonous fish with no known antidote. Here is a picture to document the fact
Well, it could just be me in front of something that looks like fish, and I’m not going to eat it anyway, but trust me, I had it. Yes, I wanted [...]
A groundbreaking paper “Generation of long RNA chains in water” from Costanzo, Pino, Ciciriello and Di Mauro on Journal of Biological Chemistry proposes conditions for the obtainment of complex RNA chains from cyclic nucleotides. The proposed conditions are typical for the pre-biotic Earth: hot springs and puddles with water at moderate temperature (40 to 90 [...]
This is a very interesting application that should convey you an idea of the size of small things: from a coffee bean down to a small carbon atom. It pairs with this movie about the size of planets and stars. Fascinating and humbling.
You are welcome to take a look at Part 1 and Part2 of this series.
In this third part of the “silicon-based” bacterial evolution, we move to the real action. I developed a program (you can download it from here), which perform evolutive selection based on mathematical criteria. The program has a set of rules to [...]
I am fascinated by this movie, showing the enzymatic complex acting on DNA to perform duplication. You can see the direct copy and the Okazaki’s fragments while they are started, produced, and completed. Amazing machine.
This is the second part of a post relative to evolution. You can find the first part of the post here.
The last argument in the first post was relative to the requirements for evolution to happen. To recall, you need
An imperfect replicator, an entity able to produce a copy of itself, for example the DNA [...]
This post is in different parts. The fact is that it requires quite a lot of time investment, something I really don’t have in this period.
A long time ago I wanted to play with the concept of genetic code, and how it represents nothing but a language to code for molecular machines. As the Jacquard [...]
I found a very interesting commentary by Nick Bostrom, about the existence of extraterrestrial life and the so-called Fermi Paradox.
The point Nick Bostrom presents is sensible: the current evidence is that life is apparently not very frequent in the Universe. Despite all efforts we did toward finding life, intelligent or not, we failed. Moreover, the [...]
I am doing proofreading of a textbook and I spotted a quite frequent use of the term “protein-encoding genes”. I reported it as an error, preferring “protein-coding genes”.
Why? There is a strong difference between the two words:
to encode means to perform an operation that transform some information from one representational form to another. Something that [...]
Today I was taking a look at this page, and in particular to the geological clock image
Of course there’s uncertainty on the correctness of the actual moments in time, but assuming these values are more or less correct it is quite interesting to note that it took only 500 million years to go from a [...]