Systematic humanization of yeast genes reveals conserved functions &…modularity http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6237/921.abstract #yeast survive in half of 400 swaps
Archive for the 'SciLit' Category
Systematic humanization of yeast genes reveals conserved functions and genetic modularity
September 23, 2015Saturated Reconstruction of a Volume of Neocortex | Lichtman Lab at Harvard
September 23, 2015Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages | Journal of The Royal Society Interface
September 22, 2015Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale #evolution of #programming languages http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/107/20150249 Clustering groups these into trees
Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages
Sergi Valverde, Ricard V. Solé
Why Human Disease-Associated Residues Appear as the Wild-Type in Other Species: Genome-Scale Structural Evidence for the Compensation Hypothesis
September 14, 2015Why human disease-associated residues appear as WT in other species http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/7/1787.abstract Compensation by their 3D structural neighbors
New life for old bones
September 14, 2015New life for old bones https://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6246/358.summary An explosion in ancient DNA research. Water & heat hard on DNA, creating a northern bias
Rock-paper-scissors may explain evolutionary ‘games’ in nature
September 8, 2015Rock-paper-scissors may explain evolutionary ‘games’
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/05/rock-paper-scissors-may-explain-evolutionary-games-nature How aggressive, cooperative & deceptive behaviors can coexist
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“The hand game “rock-paper-scissors” is a classic way to settle playground disputes, with rock smashing scissors, scissors cutting paper, and paper covering rock. But it turns out that nature plays its own versions of the game, and mathematicians and biologists have used it to study everything from human societies to bacteria in a petri dish. Now, researchers have found that when players change their strategies on the fly, a stable pattern arises in which each of the three weapons gains and loses popularity in turn. The discovery could shed light on how living creatures maintain competing strategies in the struggle for existence.
When applied to biology, rock-paper-scissors blossoms from a two-person children’s game into a complex dance among multiple players. Certain lizards, for example, use three competing
strategies—aggression, cooperation, and deception—to win mates, with each tactic beating one and losing to another—just like rock, paper, and scissors. For the lizards, winning the game equates to making babies.
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Inspired by computer simulations of a related game, two
mathematicians—Steven Strogatz and Danielle Toupo of Cornell University—decided to get to the root of what happens when players switch strategies midgame. “I thought it was fascinating, and I wanted to find a mathematical model that would describe this in its simplest form,” Strogatz says. They went back to basics, studying the pure equations instead of complicated computer simulations.”
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A New Initiative on Precision Medicine — NEJM
September 8, 2015A New Initiative on Precision Medicine
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1500523 Notable: focus on #cancergenomics & mention of endophenotypes & #QS data
Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., and Harold Varmus, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2015; 372:793-795February 26, 2015DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1500523
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“These features make efforts to improve the ways we anticipate, prevent, diagnose, and treat cancers both urgent and promising. Realizing that promise, however, will require the many different efforts reflected in the President’s initiative. To achieve a deeper understanding of cancers and discover additional tools for molecular diagnosis, we will need to analyze many more cancer genomes. ….
The cancer-focused component of this initiative will be designed to address some of the obstacles that have already been encountered in “precision oncology”: unexplained drug resistance, genomic
heterogeneity of tumors, insufficient means for monitoring responses and tumor recurrence, and limited knowledge about the use of drug combinations.
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The initiative’s second component entails pursuing research advances that will enable better assessment of disease risk, understanding of disease mechanisms, and prediction of optimal therapy for many more diseases, with the goal of expanding the benefits of precision medicine into myriad aspects of health and health care.
The initiative will encourage and support the next generation of scientists to develop creative new approaches for detecting, measuring, and analyzing a wide range of biomedical information — including molecular, genomic, cellular, clinical, behavioral, physiological, and environmental parameters. Many possibilities for future applications spring to mind: today’s blood counts might be replaced by a census of hundreds of distinct types of immune cells; data from mobile devices might provide real-time monitoring of glucose, blood pressure, and cardiac rhythm; genotyping might reveal particular genetic variants that confer protection against specific diseases…
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Cell-of-origin chromatin organization shapes the mutational landscape of cancer : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
September 2, 2015#Chromatin…shapes the mutational landscape of cancer
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7539/full/nature14221.html Low DNase correlates w/ high SNVs in melanoma. True generally?
The most incompressible metal osmium at static pressures above 750 gigapascals : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
August 31, 2015The most incompressible metal Os at… >750 GPa
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14681.html Surprisingly, core rather than valence electrons affected by pressure
Endosymbiotic origin and differential loss of eukaryotic genes : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
August 28, 2015Endosymbiotic origin & differential loss of eukaryotic
geneshttp://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v524/n7566/full/nature14963.html For Euks, horizontal transfer is episodic (v continuous)
linkstream2 microblog 