The kind folks behind StackOverflow, a free Question/Answers website for programming questions, recently decided to open new Q/A websites for many additional interesting topics, from wine tasting and cooking to mathematics. The fundamental requisite for such new sites to be opened is a rather strict community review and development of a critical mass of contributors [...]
As you probably heard in the news, Craig Venter, the American biologist best known for starting up Celera Genomics and sequencing the human genome, achieved another big success. He created a fully working new bacterium, programming its DNA from scratch.
Like a computer having hardware and software, a bacterium has a set of components that execute [...]
Rule changed: revolutionized the treatment of cancer
Cisplatin, formula [PtCl2(NH3)2] is a very simple compound of the precious metal platinum. It revolutionized the treatment of some types of cancer, in some cases with almost total chance of success, and it can be considered to full extent the “penicillin for (some, unfortunately) cancer treatment”.
March 19, 2010 – 10:53 am
Occasionally, I have to write using a pen. I’ve never had a beautiful calligraphy (by the way, a tautology, since calligraphy already comes from the Greek for “beautiful writing”) but I realized that with time my skills became worse and worse. The reason, I feel, is that my brain wants a higher throughput of concepts [...]
January 19, 2010 – 12:24 pm
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 [...]
November 25, 2009 – 3:39 am
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 [...]
October 30, 2009 – 9:34 am
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 [...]
