Schlagwort: evolution
The genetic origins of the world’s first farmers clarified
Sex pays off: Asexual reproduction can have negative effects on genome evolution in stick insects
Sucking millipedes: independent evolution of a complex sucking pump in arthropods
Whether nectar-sucking butterflies or blood-sucking mosquitoes – the ingestion of liquid food has long been known for many insects and other arthropods. A research team from Germany and Switzerland, led by the LIB and the University of Bonn, now shows that millipedes also use a sucking pump to ingest liquid food. A sucking pump has thus evolved independently in different groups of organisms over several 100 million years. In the process, astonishingly similar biomechanical solutions for ingesting liquid food have evolved in widely distant animal groups. The study results have been published in the journal Science Advances.
Sperm or eggs? How hermaphroditic worms distribute their resources
New personalized test for an earlier and more accurate prediction of cancer relapse
Why do we age? The role of natural selection
ERC-Starting-Grant für Greifswalder Wissenschaftler
Systematically examining the way spatial structure influences the evolution of cancer
Mitochondria and the evolutionary roots of cancer
Cancer is a group of almost 200 diseases that involve variety of changes in cell structure, morphology, and physiology. Cancer phenotype is underlying several alterations in cellular dynamics with three most critical features, which includes self-sufficiency in growth signals and insensitivity to inhibitory signals, evasion of programmed cell death and limitless replicative potential with a potential for the invasion of other organs. Cancer disease is widespread among metazoans. Some properties of cancer cells such as uncontrolled cell proliferation, lack of apoptosis, hypoxia, fermentative metabolism and free cell motility, i.e. metastasis, resemble a prokaryotic lifestyle, which leads to the assumption of a reversal like evolution from eucariotic back to proteobacterial state. This phenotype matches the phenotype of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) that resulted from the endosymbiosis between archaebacteria and α-proteobacteria, which later became the mitochondria.
Quantum Tunnelling to the Origin and Evolution of Life
Quantum tunnelling is a phenomenon which becomes relevant at the nanoscale and below. It is a paradox from the classical point of view as it enables elementary particles and atoms to permeate an energetic barrier without the need for sufficient energy to overcome it. Tunnelling is being of vital importance for life: physical and chemical processes can be traced directly back to the effects of quantum tunnelling. These processes include the prebiotic chemistry as well as the function of biomolecular nanomachines and has many highly important implications that can be derived from to the field of molecular, prebiotic chemistry and biological evolution, respectively.