#Also some genes are part of mitochondrial DNA

[sorrowandpride]

I never understood Europeans bitching about (North) Americans and their obsession with ancestry until I read the comments on an archaeological article on Facebook 🥴 People will shove their ancestry DNA results down your throat when the conversation has absolutely nothing to do with it 😭

[reasoningdaily]

Cheddar Man is a human male fossil found in Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England. The skeletal remains date to the Mesolithic (ca. 9100 BP) and it appears that he died a violent death. A large crater-like lesion just above the skull’s right orbit suggests that the man may have also been suffering from a bone infection.

Excavated in 1903 in Gough’s Cave in Somerset, Cheddar Man is Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton. The remains are kept by the Natural History Museum in London in the new Human Evolution gallery.[1]

Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age.

It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.

The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be

Analysis of his nuclear DNA indicates that he was a typical member of the western European population at the time, probably with lactose intolerance, dark skin, blue eyes, and dark curly or wavy hair.[2]

Nuclear DNA sequence data

Nuclear DNA was extracted from the petrous part of the temporal bone by a team from the Natural History Museum in 2018.[3] The genetic markers suggested (based on their associations in modern populations whose phenotypes are known) that he probably had blue eyes, lactose intolerance, dark curly or wavy hair, and, less certainly,[3][4] dark to very dark skin.[2][5] These features are typical of the European population of the time, now known as West European Hunter-Gatherers. This population forms about 10%, on average, of the ancestry of Britons without a recent family history of immigration.[2]

The mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man was of haplogroup U5b1.[2] Some 65% of western European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had haplogroup U5; today it is widely distributed, at lower frequencies, across western Eurasia and northern Africa. In 1996, Bryan Sykes of the University of Oxford first sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from one of Cheddar Man’s molars.[7][8][9]

There was no genetic link with the other skeletons from Gough’s Cave, which are 5,000 years older than Cheddar Man. For much of this intervening period, the last glaciation of Europe had made the area unsuitable for human life.

Genetic change in Britain since the Mesolithic:

Britain was periodically settled and then cleared during ice ages until the end of the last glacial period about 11,700 years ago, since when it has been continuously inhabited.

Until now, though, it hasn’t been clear whether each wave of migrants was seeded from the same population in mainland Europe; the latest results suggest this was not the case.

The team homed in on genes known to be linked to skin colour, hair colour and texture, and eye colour. For skin tone, there are a handful of genetic variants linked to reduced pigmentation, including some that are very widespread in European populations today. However, Cheddar Man had “ancestral” versions of all these genes, strongly suggesting he would have had “dark to black” skin tone, but combined with blue eyes.

[madamlaydebug]

Crossing the Abyss....

Currently, many of us may be enduring kundalini symptoms which impact deep subatomic and cellular shifts instructed through the Mitochondrial DNA, which further transform and change our metabolism and its hormonal pathways. The amount of light frequency quotient held by the cell and tissues of the body is directly related to the degree of mitochondrial function and results in the stages of embodiment of the corrected Holy Mother principle.

With the recent lunar energies shifting, the cosmic waters in the astral plane undergo reconfiguration with the new Law to extract the Dark Mother alien architecture and reclaim the Divine Mother Creation Seed. The result of this alchemical transmutation is the union of the lunar with the solar which creates the Divine Fire Water or Azoth principle. For some women, there is a cycle of death and then regeneration that may be experienced in the female reproductive organs at any biological age. The Dark or Reversal Mother Principle was replicated and generated from NAA (or Archons) harvesting lunar, magnetic and constellation forces to enforce patriarchal domination mind control on earth. The lunar forces have influenced the magnetic field to reverse the Holy Mother, obliterate her feminine principle and commandeer her womb of reproduction on the earth for many generations. The Reversal Mother architecture is a complex etheric structure which was placed in the subatomic layers and lower astral fields which also manifest itself in material creation as hierarchies of Satanic Forces. Within these astral pockets of etheric gas substance, the NAA cloned or replicated creation seeds (i.e. ovum, eggs) that are inherently a part of the consciousness body of the Holy Mother principle. (The ovum creation codes that make up her body are called the Cathar.) During the Ascension cycle awakened Indigo females are reclaiming the Universal Holy Mother's creation seed for the earth (restoration of the Cathar body), as this is recorded in the original spark of Mitochondrial DNA.

Capricornian Fermentation

As we move into the 11th stage of Capricorn, the main alchemical themes are fermentation of the flesh with the source energy inside our cells, which excite themselves, causing divine illumination. The inner mitochondrial membrane is sorted into numerous cristae, which expand the surface area of the inner mitochondrial membrane, enhancing its ability to produce ATP. It is this area of the mitochondrion, once functioning properly, that increases the ATP energy and generates light into the cells and tissues of the body. Synchronically, the name “cristae” has been given through scientific discovery when its direct implication is related to the activation of the crystal gene.

Fermentation is the spiritual alchemical process which shifts the production and source of energy that is required for the body functions. This stage begins to change how the ATP production is made in the mitochondria of the cell and how that energy is distributed to cellular tissues. New requirements of vital energies are manufactured by increasing the ATP pump which increase available energy needed to continue the life processes. There is an increase of ATP measured in the cells as the person is able to hold more light in their physical cells, increasing their consciousness. This also relates to increasing the size and quality of the auric light body.

The body is much physically stronger now even if vitality feels low. Also, the fermentation process is used to produce different levels of enzymatic substances, which the physical body uses to support a variety of shifting hormonal and chemical reactions. During the ascension stages of symptoms, this is commonly experienced as a highly physical shift in the digestive, immune, cellular and brain processing.

With the presence of Mother shifting, many of us may feel more deeply our motherly and reproductive connections. We may sense the connection between our bodies and into the earth kingdoms, the earthy dirt, earth crust, earth rock, her minerals and crystals. The earth is communicating to us in new ways if we listen. Consciousness purification is the alchemical process of which the earthly density of carbon slag is exposed to tremendous heat and fire, the intense pressure between the polarities of forces distill the purity of the diamond crystalline heart.

Mothers Aqua Portal Tunnel Vortex

The Cosmic Mother principle returns energetic balance into the earth body, reclaiming the body elemental through her principles of anabolism and catabolism, forces of creation and destruction which arise out from the core of the infinite Creatrix. Kabbalists refer to this as the Ein Soph, the Mother principle as the conflagration of plasma, gases, aether rising out from the rings of chaos reaching into the unmanifest layers.

Cosmic Mother thus allows the creation of more and more complex structures that expand consciousness through her anabolic process. At the same time there is another mechanism to reclaim unused or recycle dead resources like miasma and waste. If a structure is not referenced by the consciousness laws of any other structure, its form is digested and recycled. Through the Mothers Aqua Portal Tunnel Vortex, when we send forms, structures and entities to Cosmic Mother, the form is neutralized and it is free to follow the laws of its own nature.

Cosmic Mother spirals her Tunnel vortex arcing back towards the center of the Creatrix field, returning to the center point of all union, and unwinds back into the expanding fields of the unmanifest. The outer rings of the unmanifest fields are the sections of the Abyss. (Daath). These outer spaces are which form the Abyss of un-identity or un-being, sections of the Luciferian Abyss of which ego or wasteful form is eventually digested and absorbed. Hence, it is the primordial death of the ego that most all humans fear as the metaphor for the complete annihilation of the Self. Cosmic Mother's function represents the creation (anabolism), destruction (catabolism) and fields of all potential within the unmanifest, all simultaneously. The dead zones outside her unmanifest fields are the space of Abyss.

When we heal our consciousness body of these dead zones and fill them with eternal living light, we may have awakening experiences where we cross the Abyss and its shadow to heal our fears and separation with God.

Abyss of separation (Satanic Force)Abyss of knowledge (Luciferian Force)Abyss of un-being (or un-becoming) (Ego Death)

(source: Consciousness Corridors, October 2014)

[uniofaberdeen]

Study reveals new insights into the origins of Scotland's mysterious Picts

Scotland's Picts have long been viewed as a mysterious people with their enigmatic symbols and inscriptions, accentuated by representations of them as wild barbarians with exotic origins.

But a newly published study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Aberdeen and Liverpool John Moores University is helping to shed new light on the origins of the Picts.

The Picts were first mentioned in the late 3rd century CE as resisting the Romans and went on to form a powerful kingdom that ruled over a large part of northern Britain, in present-day north-east Scotland.

In the medieval period, the Picts were considered immigrants from Thrace (north of the Aegean Sea), Scythia (eastern Europe), or isles north of Britain but as they left few written sources of their own little is known of their origins or relations with other cultural groups living in Britain.

Archaeologists have conducted the first extensive analysis of Pictish genomes and their results have been published today (27/04/2023) in the open access journal PLOS Genetics.

The results reveal a long-standing genetic continuity in some regions of the British Isles, helping to build a picture of where the Picts came from and providing new understanding of how present-day genetic diversity formed. The findings also confirm descriptions by the great English historian Bede of the far-flung eastern origins of the Picts as one of myth and fantasy.

The researchers used Identity-By-Descent (IBD) methods to compare two high-quality Pictish genomes sequenced from individuals excavated from Pictish-era cemeteries at Lundin Links in Fife (Southern Pictland) and Balintore in Easter Ross (Northern Pictland) to those of previously published ancient genomes as well as the modern population.

Dr Linus Girdland Flink of the University of Aberdeen, senior corresponding author of the study, said: “Among the peoples present during the first millennium CE in Britain, the Picts are one of the most enigmatic.

“Their unique cultural features such as Pictish symbols and the scarcity of contemporary literary and archaeological sources resulted in many diverse hypotheses about their origin, lifestyle and culture, part of the so-called ‘Pictish problem’.

“We aimed to determine the genetic relationships between the Picts and neighbouring modern-day and ancient populations.

“Using DNA analysis, we have been able to fill a gap in an understudied area of Scotland’s past.

“Our results show that individuals from western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Northumbria display a higher degree of Identity-By-Descent (IBD) sharing with the Pictish genomes, meaning they are genetically most similar among modern populations.”

This genetic make-up was distinct from areas of southern England where there is a greater relative degree of Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Dr Adeline Morez from Liverpool John Moores University, lead corresponding author of the study, adds: “Our findings also support the idea of regional continuity between the Late Iron Age and early medieval periods and indicates that the Picts were local to the British Isles in their origin, as their gene pool is drawn from the older Iron Age, and not from large-scale migration, from exotic locations far to the east.

“However, by comparing the samples between southern and northern Pictland we can also see that they were not one homogenous group and that there are some distinct differences, which point to patterns of migration and life-time mobility that require further study.”

The analysis of mitochondrial genomes from Lundin Links has also provided an insight into another Pictish myth – that they practised a form of matriliny, with succession and perhaps inheritance going to the sister’s son rather than directly through the male line.

“In a matrilocal system we would expect to find females staying in their birthplace after their marriage and throughout their life.

“At Lundin Links, diversity in the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA suggests this was not the case. This finding challenges the older hypotheses that Pictish succession was passed along the mother’s side and raise further questions about our understanding of Pictish society and its organisation.”

[mrunalnerkarblog]

Mitochondrial Disorders Treatment Market | Growth, Trends And Forecast (2023–2028)

Mitochondrial disorders are inherited chronic disorders characterized by a wide range of biochemical and genetic mitochondrial defects and mutations. The disorder affects multiple organs, which includes brain, heart, liver, skeletal muscles, kidney, and respiratory systems. The patients with mitochondrial disorders often suffer from muscle weakness, exercise intolerance, and fatigue due to reduction in mitochondrial respiration, which is caused due to mitochondrial DNA mutations leading to reduced ability to produce cellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Despite major advances in understanding of the molecular mechanisms, currently there are no effective treatments for the disease. The treatment of mitochondrial disorders is mostly performed with different vitamins, co-factors, off-label drugs approved for other indications, and nutritional supplements. However, the research organizations and pharmaceutical companies are involved in development of novel drugs with technology advancements including the use of biomarkers, replacement therapies and sophisticated trial designs, thus creating a lucrative opportunity for the market growth.

Mitochondrial Disorders Treatment Market: Market Dynamics

Increasing prevalence of mitochondrial disorders causing significant morbidity and mortality combined with the higher potential of genetic transmission to the next generation are the factors driving the market growth. According to the Wellcome Center for Mitochondrial Research, 2015, about 10 people per 100,000 have a mitochondrial disorders, which often express first in early childhood. According to the Genetic and Rare Disease Information Center, women with mitochondrial genetic disorders have 50% chance with each pregnancy of passing along the altered gene to the offspring, thus indicating the rising burden of the disease. Also, the mitochondrial disorders treatment market is expected to gain significant traction in the future, as the pharmaceutical drugs approved for the treatment of primary mitochondrial disease have orphan drug status, thereby having a greater potential for market approval than conventional pharmaceuticals. Moreover, the approval of novel drug molecules from the regulatory agencies is expected to create a lucrative opportunity for the growth of mitochondrial disorders treatment market. For instance, in April 2018, NeuroVive Pharmaceutical AB received orphan drug designation to KL1333 by the US Food and Drug administration (FDA) for the treatment of inherited mitochondrial respiratory chain diseases (MRCD).

Mitochondrial Disorders Treatment Market: Regional Dynamics

Regional segmentation of the global mitochondrial disorders treatment market by Coherent Market Insights comprises North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. North America is expected to hold a dominant position in the global mitochondrial disorders treatment market over the forecast period, owing to increasing prevalence of the disease and the rising number of initiatives to spread awareness and support novel drug development. According to the Institute of Medicine, U.S., 2015, an estimated 30,000 Americans are suffering from inherited defects in their mitochondria. Also, according to the Foundation for Mitochondrial Medicine, an estimated 1,000 children per year are born with some form of mitochondrial disease in the U.S. Moreover, the North American Mitochondrial Disease Consortium (NAMDC), a part of Rare Disease Clinical Research Network (RDCRN), specially works towards collecting information from mitochondrial disease patients in a clinical patient registry, thereby helping researchers to identify and recruit patients for future studies.

[mailweasel53]

Efficiency look at the particular uEXPLORER Total-body PET/CT reader determined by AdagrasibA NU 2-2018 with a lot more assessments to characterize long axial field-of-view PET readers

0% to eight.0%. In the mean time, the molecular weights a declining development via just like 60,000 in order to similar to 45,Thousand g/mol. The smaller size and more branched polysaccharides somewhat taken out during the early stages beneath milder situations, and also the bigger molecular size plus more linear hemicelluloses somewhat isolated underneath better alkaline conditions.Heterochromatin enhancement along with nuclear firm are very important inside gene legislations along with genome faithfulness. Proteins linked to gene silencing localize for you to websites of damage and a few Genetic make-up fix healthy proteins localize for you to heterochromatin, however the biological need for these types of connections stays uncertain. On this examine, many of us examined the function associated with double-strand-break restoration healthy proteins within #Link# gene silencing along with atomic firm. We find how the Bank kinase Tel1 and the meats Mre11 and Esc2 could peace and quiet a media reporter gene influenced by the Friend, as well as additional restore proteins. In addition, these healthy proteins aid in the localization of silenced domains to particular pockets from the nucleus. We all recognize two unique systems with regard to repair protein-mediated silencing-via indirect and direct friendships with There meats, along with by tethering loci to the fischer outside. This study unveils earlier unfamiliar connections involving repair protein as well as silencing proteins along with suggests insights in the device main genome honesty.This study has been taken on to evaluate the end results #Link# of 3-(5'-hydroxymethyl-2'-furyl)-1-benzyl indazole (YC-1), a acknowledged activator associated with dissolvable guanylyl cyclase, on formyl-L-methionyl-L-leucyl-L-phenylalanine (FMLP) and complement aspect 5a (C5a)-induced homotypic human neutrophil aggregation. YC-1 as well as the phosphodiesterase (PDE)Some inhibitors rolipram and Ro 20-1724, but not the PDE3 chemical milrinone, inhibited your location replies ignited by simply FMLP and C5a. In comparison, sodium nitroprusside (SNP) didn't have any influence on FMLP- or even C5a-induced neutrophil gathering or amassing. Additionally, SNP as well as YC-1 did not change the YC-1-induced answers. Furthermore, YC- I as well as rolipram, but not milrinone, brought on significant raises in camp out levels, which usually transpired from the self-consciousness involving PDE action however, not an increase in adenylate cyclase operate. Strangely enough, adenosine deaminase canceled your inhibitory consequences along with camping amounts of YC-1, rolipram, and also Ro 20-1724. To conclude, these kinds of benefits indicate that this inhibitory aftereffect of YC-1 on homotypic neutrophil location is actually attributed to a great top in the camp out focus by way of inhibition in the task of PDE, which can potentiate the autocrine capabilities of endogenous adenosine. (h) '07 Elsevier T.Sixth is v. All privileges reserved.Qualifications: Mitochondrial genes are probably the normally employed guns in reports of species' phylogeography and #Link# pull findings about taxonomy. The Hyles euphorbiae complex (HEC) comprises 6 distinct mitochondrial lineages in the Mediterranean and beyond region, ones one particular reveals a cryptic disjunct submitting. The particular major mitochondrial family tree in many associated with European countries, euphorbiae, is additionally present upon The island of malta; however, it's nowadays curiously lacking from The southern part of Croatia as well as Sicily, where it really is replaced by 'italica'. A separate natural entity throughout France can be further corroborated by simply larval coloring habits having a congruent, restricted suture area across the North Apennines. By means of traditional DNA obtained from museum examples, all of us targeted to investigate your development of the mitochondrial group composition from the HEC inside France along with Malta through the entire Last century.

[botanyshitposts]

worstie im sorry to break it to you but it's not just AOX and UCP genes you'd need to clone into the moss, you'd also need to increase the mitochondrial density and up respiratory activity which is like a 15 year project.

ahhh but you’re evaluating my high school huge brained Hot Plant plan, not my college huge brained Hot Plant plan!

(im gonna lay out my technical plan here, so this is a pretty dense and possibly incomprehensible response for like, most normal people not obsessed with the possibility of Hot Plant, just a warning)

first of all, high school me thought a moss would work, but now i think that’s wayyyy too far removed both from a genetic and anatomical standpoint. my best bet would be doing it on Arabadopsis, partially because of the high turnover rate, partially because that entire thing is pretty well mapped out and it would be easier to find the right genes and enzymes to cut the DNA. completely ideally the best solution would be to just choose another plant from Araceae, because they already have the large tubers for energy storage and the spadix structure, but the problem there is those plants are much less thoroughly mapped and take forever to grow.

now, the other thing here is the question of isolating an AOX pathway controller from a naturally thermogenic plant. i do not have the equipment to do this, i do not have the knowledge to do this, and not many plants are extensively mapped out in Araceae to begin with, so without being able to sequence the DNA and all that it would be nearly impossible. so the next best option would be to try to get the plants to start doing thermogenesis on their own.

we have reached the next stage of the Hot Plant plan. the challenge now is the anatomy; in Aroids it’s easy because you can just gear towards getting the spadix to heat up, but luckily there are a wide range of plants who do thermogenesis, and its not just Aroids. my first step there would be to see where exactly in the flower other plants without a spadix generate heat; second step is to find where approximately that organ is in Arabadopsis; third step is to find the part of the genome that controls flower development, specifically of that part of the flower, because luckily these plants only generate heat when they bloom, and the fourth step-- and this is my biggest brained innovation into Hot Plant Theory yet-- is to just increase the mitochondrial density in that organ by copy and pasting a bunch of mitochondrial promoters in there to see what happens.

at worst, nothing happens, or the plant refuses to flower or germinate in the first place because it realizes that i am playing with god and have no idea what i’m doing and it will not play my games. okay-ish outcome, the mitochondrial activity increases, but thermogenesis doesn’t happen because the AOX pathway is working at the normal rate and respiratory activity is the same. best outcome, the higher amount of mitochondria increases AOX activity and respiration just because there’s more there functioning, so there’s a higher amount of electrons being expelled regardless of how inefficient the system is in terms of how plants evolved for thermogenesis pull it off, and we get a very mildly Hot Flower. the question then is exactly how long it could keep it up.

you may be thinking, wow quill, that sounds incredibly naive, you cant just do that. you cant just take a bunch of mitochondrial promoters and jam them into some random part of the genome to increase the density in hopes that it’ll make the plant heat up (of all the things you could possibly want it to do). and you would be right, i do not know what i am doing and my next immediate step is do see if it’s even possible, quite frankly, and there’s a high likelyhood it would be a 15 year project and/or impossible without a real lab and funding regardless of how i go about doing it. however, the pipe dream of increasing mitochondrial density in one section of Arabadopsis is a lot more obtainable then trying to get a moss, which doesn’t even have the correct anatomy, to heat up through virtue of implanting a gene from an unsequenced flowering plant.

either way, ill keep my day job lmao

[incorrect-primarchs-quotes]

I’m pretty recent into Warhammer because of if the emperor had a text to speech device. So My first thought when I heard of Erda after hearing about her here was like???? Why'd they suddenly add her in? What was the point?? I liked the one where the chaos gods scattered the Primarchs instead of her because she could’ve just hidden them on the same planet??? Instead of all over the dang place

I hate Erda too, I belive the entire fandom hates her actually.

I'm gonna bring out my science-nerd side right now so I hope you won't mind: I do believe that the primarchs having a biological mother actually makes sense, what I don't like is how they wrote her.

So, for the nerdy explanation: people don't have just one type of DNA. We know that our main DNA is made by a 50% from our mother and a 50% from our father, so if we only had this type - theoretically speaking- the Emps could have used part of his own genes and then added something else to make it complete. However, there is a type of DNA that actually permits us to live and that's the mitochondrial's DNA, which only come from the mother's genetic line. Basically, it doesn't matter if you're a boy or a girl, your mitochondria are the same as your mother, and her own are the same as her mother and so on. Since we are speaking of super-nearly-gods-humans, I don't think that the normal genes of a woman could have been sufficient to actually permit the primarchs' DNAs to achieve such levels of 'power' - they have an embarrassing level of physical strength and resistance, also let's not talk about they super regeneration speed and all their other superthings. So for me - someone who loves genetic and could luckily study at least the basics of this subject - actually makes sense that there is a biological mother. Also, technically Erda was also the best geneticist ever lived, her knowledge surpassed even the Emps' on this topic, so maybe there was a reason to actually use her genes too instead of using everything from the Emp (also, while I do believe He could have theoretically used his own mitochondrial DNA, I do believe that it would have taken them a lot more time of studying and trying, and we know that He didn't wanted to wait, so using some already-ready-and-functional cells from Erda was definitely the faster way to go).

Nerd speaking aside: Erda is a terrible character. I could literally make you a list of the things I hate about her, but what I do hate the most is the fact that she could have been one of the finest female characters ever lived in warhammer (and we know that unfortunately there aren't a lot of cool and powerful females in here, something which I myself don't really enjoy), and yet we have this.

She was basically the second most powerful being in the universe, after the Emp. She could have been the ultra-Empress of everything, they could have written her something actually cool. We know that she was so in love with the Emp that she was basically blind to everything else and, although this is something I'm not found of, they could have make her 10000 times better by adding something else afterwards. Like, she yeeted the primarchs away because she wanted to save them from the Emp? That's ok, but make her feel and do something. All she does is fleeing and hiding when she could have changed in the exact moment she yeeted the babies away: she could have sworn to stop the Emperor, to become his enemy either by actually fighting him openly or being more subtle. The possibility were many, yet they chose the most boring and pathetic one.

[tanadrin]

Khoda Station

For a long time after she joined the Project, Sirrek had found Tjumak to be a puzzle, the most difficult to understand of her colleagues. She took as read that you had to have pretty good reasons to want to risk defying the Archive’s most sacrosanct law, and also to spend half of every year out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest transport routes and thousands from the nearest settlements. For most of the people at the station, their motives were actually pretty simple. Koridek believed passionately in the work; so passionately that he was willing to break his most deeply held convictions about what it meant to be an Archivist. For him it was all about values. His desire to serve humanity ran deep, and that was what made him a good fit for the Archive. His desire to serve Paradise, well, that ran even deeper; it was the source of his desire to serve humanity, to protect their nascent colony, but also to violate an order that had been created decades before Sirrek was born, to prevent terrible bloodshed. Depending on how you looked at it, that made him a very bad archivist indeed.

Ardhat was also simple. She was a problem-solver. That wasn’t all of it, but it was most of it. Of course, she believed mightily, too, but Sirrek doubted anyone could believe in anything as strongly as Koridek did. But above all else, Ardhat wanted to solve the biggest problems she could find. That was what got her up in the mornings, and drove her forward. She was a puzzle-cracker, a code-breaker, a solution-seeker, a builder-of-systems. She would have been a fine architect, or a talented engineer, or a clever physicist. But what greater puzzle was there than the Great Record? What greater problem to solve could there be than resurrecting a lost world out of the most ancient memory of the past? Of building a whole new ecosystem, alongside and on top on alien to it that already existed? Sirrek was quite certain that Ardhat would die to protect the Project if it ever came to it, but in the meantime, she would live for its mysteries.

Sirrek? Well, introspection wasn’t her strong suit. But where Ardhat had a cordial indifference to authority and Koridek a deep but respectful complaint against it, Sirrek just hated being told what to do. And they had told her, you shall not be a biologist. Not in the way you want to be. You shall not undertake any part of the great work--for it will not begin in your lifetime. They had said to her, you shall leave Paradise fallow, at least for a human definition of the term. And so Sirrek hated them for that, hated them for deciding before she was born that all her talents and her ambition must be sacrificed in the name of politics, hated the religious zealots and the blind ideologues whose fledgeling war meant that it would be many lifetimes before the Paradise she dreamed of would come to be. She was compelled to disobey. That was what got her out of bed in the morning.

But Tjumak. There was a mystery. He affected it a little, Sirrek thought. He spent his days ensconced in the middle of his dark laboratory, like the heart of an animal, or the engine of a machine. He did not come and go, like Koridek. The dim light of the displays shone on the glossy exterior of his support apparatus. He had once had a survival suit, Koridek said, and had gone back and forth from the surface like most of the other Archivists, returning to Ammas Echor when the strain of surface living became too great. Archivists were not born for planetbound life; they were humanity as it lived between the stars, made for the long dreamlike time in the cold and dark, and for keeping the long memory of their people alive. How long did our ancestors travel from star to star? Sirrek had once asked her mother, when she was young. For countless ages, she had replied. Since the Garden was lost to us in the beginning of time.

A survival suit was meant to be a temporary thing, a way to endure the stresses of gravity and the immoderate temperatures of the surface. What, do you go naked in space? Sirrek had asked Koridek. Koridek laughed. No, he said. We still have to wear suits on the vessel, though they are much lighter. You see me only as a hulking, heavy thing in this armor. In microgravity, I am considered graceful; above the sky, I can dance. Why someone would exchange that for a planetbound prison, much less one where they could not leave the room they worked in, Sirrek struggled to guess. But that was what Tjumak had done. From the outside, he looked almost like a silly toy: a round, smooth metal body, topped with a round, smooth head on a short, flexible neck. His arms were more graceful, and the apparatus in which he set could turn this way and that to reach th various monitors and keyboards around him; but apparently much of the interface was actually inside the suit, which in Tjumak’s case was more of a chamber, one in which he floated in a carefully-formulated synthetic fluid. And if the power goes out? Sirrek had asked. He will be very annoyed until someone finds the switch for the backup generator, Koridek said.

Direct neural prosthetics like the Archivists used, and which Tjumak relied on for his work, were rare among the younger generations, so it was probably a less claustrophobic way of living than Sirrek imagined. And if he really had to, he probably could switch back to a survival suit. Like if they ever got caught, and had to evacuate the station. That was a possibility she did her best not to dwell on.

She got a little window into Tjumak’s world, or at least his thought process, when they spent several long weeks working on a section of the Great Record. It was a frustrating and exceedingly difficult task, and the missing portions that Sirrek needed amounted to only a handful of characters, but the Record was nearly impossible to work with directly. When she was little, her teachers had explained that the Great Record was a library of the genetic information of every animal and plant and little microscopic beastie that had ever lived in the Garden, the world humankind had come from. And when their most ancient ancestors, the ancestors of their unimaginably remote ancestors, had had to leave the Garden as exiles, they preserved the Record, and kept it safe, for hundreds of thousands of years.

That was almost, but not quite, entirely a lie. When she had started studying biology, with an eye to genetics and to endobotany specifically (back when she imagined that she might be permitted to do something with her training), she started learning about how the Great Record worked. It wasn’t just a record of DNA; that on its own would have been quite useless, she was assured. DNA was an important part of it, of course, nuclear and mitochondrial both, but only a small part. Rather, the Record had been compiled as an image of the shape of a living cell: it described actual genetic code, but also how DNA was formed, how proteins were folded, how DNA and RNA were transcribed, processes of methylation and copying, how mitosis and meiosis functioned, and so on and so forth, attempting to describe the metabolism of an ideal cell, one which contained within it the potential to embody almost any form of life to which humankind had once been related; and it was by reference to this elaborate, ideal lifeform that literally millions of other species, from single-celled bacteria that lived in the human gut to storybook leviathans, were described. And the reason, Sirrek was told, that the Record had been composed in this way was that, long long ago, their ancestors had once had the technology to use those reference descriptions directly. The heart of the Record was a terrible lacuna, a tool that had been so widespread, and so useful, that it had once been presumed it would never be lost.

Oh, fathers of my fathers and mothers of my mothers! Sirrek had thought. How far your children have fallen. The senior geneticists referred to this technology as the key to the universal cell; or just the key. What, exactly, it was and how it had functioned was hard to guess. It was related to other technologies they had that barely worked, and that they did not understand at all, like the ones the Archivists used to modify their genes and to improve their neural prosthetics. There were baseline humans who had been brought all the way from Rauk on the last journey, in sarcophagi that had preserved them between life and death. It was a form of the key that had brought them back to wholeness, and let them live out the rest of a natural lifespan. But it was a specialized version, a crippled and ghostly version. They did not have the true key; and they were working to rebuild it. Perhaps one day, many centuries from now, they would live up to the promise of those long-ago masters of the living world, and they would read forth out of the Record a whole teeming world, as had been intended.

But they didn’t need the key to start understanding the Record, and ordinary genetic engineering and cell manipulation techniques would serve to clone the most basic organisms recorded there. Of course, all of this was hampered by the fact that the Record was at both extremely terse, intending to encode an enormous amount of information in as small a space as possible, and maddeningly repetitive. It was not really one Record, but many; the collocation of multiple copies, in some places defective, and in others damaged. Later, totally uncomprehending generations had apparently lost all but the memory of the importance of the thing, and carefully copied what they did not understand into new forms. It was only in the glare of Rauk, millennia ago, that the Janese had finally understood what they had had in their grasp, and built it into the skeleton of Ammas Echor itself.

Understanding the Record had been the original purpose of the Archive, and in the long, slow journey to Paradise they had labored ceaselessly at their task. Still, it was slow work. And since their station did not have the benefit of access to either the Archive on Ammas Echor, or to all the latest work from investigators working on the surface, sometimes they had to work at it themselves. At Ardhat’s encouragement, Sirrek had been trying to get a handle on some of the plant species that, by their position in the Record, seemed to be relatively basal. Much of the work in unraveling that portion of the Archive had been done by others, and was well-known, but little attention had been paid to the bryophytes. Under the logic of the agreement between the Renewalists and the Instrumentalists, this didn’t matter. Actual resurrection of species was not slated to begin for nearly eighty years, and even then it would be confined to laboratories. But Sirrek wanted practical results. What she ideally wanted was trees, flowers, grasses, important primary producers that also occupied slightly different ecological niches from the xenophytes, and could be integrated alongside them. But mosses were step zero. Possibly even step negative one. All she needed was a single viable spore. In theory, everything she needed was in the Record, somewhere.

In their long, slow labor, the Archivists had painstakingly indexed the Record, but it was an immense of information, and one that was only partly understood. The language of the record, if it could be called that, was a sophisticated polyvalent writing system that could encode chemical formulae, the structure of molecules and proteins and organelles, and dipped in its most specific registers into the subatomic scale, to describe the precise interaction by which choloroplasts captured the light of the sun, to convert into energy; and at its most general, sketched a mathematical relationship between the populations of a predator and its prey. Yet for all that it said, it also left maddening amounts unsaid, details that were perhaps assumed by its creators to be common knowledge, or which simply could not be fit in.

“It’s almost gibberish,” Tjumak had observed dryly. “Almost.”

“Why do you think they made it in the first place?” Sirrek asked Tjumak. “Do you suppose they really thought the umpteenth children of their children would be able to make use of it?”

“I can only assume so. Hubris, perhaps, or merely an unfathomably acute case of optimism.”

“It had to have been made in the Garden, right?”

A small movement suggested a shrug from Tjumak. “To speculate on the historicity of our people before the last journey is to engage in theology as far as I can tell. Whatever the Garden once was, it is now more myth than fact.”

“Maybe,” said Sirrek, tapping her chin as she moved the same section of the Record back and forth on the display. The curling, two-dimensional network of shapes blurred together if you tried to take in too much of it at once, not to mention it was dispiriting. It was far easier to concentrate on the smallest legible piece, and work through it one symbol at a time. Tjumak peeked over her shoulder, and glanced at her notes.

“No, that’s not right,” he said. “That’s not a DNA sequence, it’s a protein sequence. Look, that’s a symbol for a folding geometry, in the corner.”

Sirrek muttered an impolite word and started backtracking.

“They can’t have made it during the Exile, anyway,” she said. “You can’t put millions of species on a generation ship. Even if most of them are beetles.”

“Perhaps not,” said Tjumak. “But what is an object such as this? It is a monument against ruin. If they made it in the Garden, they made it knowing its desolation was close at hand.”

“So you’re definitely in camp made-to-be-used.”

“I think… I think it doesn’t matter why they made it,” Tjumak said. He was scanning his own section of the text, which in real terms was inscribed about a meter and a half away from Sirrek’s on the same section of Ammas Echor’s structural frame; but which felt like it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. “The question is, why do we want to use it?”

“Hubris, and/or an unfathomably acute case of optimism?”

“It’s a reasonable question. We could have come to Paradise, gone down from the Ammas Echor, and made our living on this world as it is, with no attempt to change it besides the introduction of ourselves. For that matter, we could have stayed in orbit, bringing up such resources as we needed, air and water and soil, to make life there far more comfortable than it ever could have been on one of the airless or gasping worlds our ancestors lived their lives on, and left Paradise almost entirely unchanged. Yet when we arrived, we nearly fought a war against one another, not over whether to make use of the Record to resurrect the creatures of the Garden, but only how.”

“Do you think we should have considered the possibility?”

Tjumak leaned back from the display he was hunched over. The head of his support apparatus tilted up toward the ceiling, which was as close as he ever got to looking pensieve.

“I cannot honestly say yes. I’ve known space, Sirrek, real space. Not orbital microgravity, but the deepness beyond the summit of the sky. Some of my earliest memories are of the firing of Ammas Echor’s great engines, to turn our path inward toward the light below. Of the long, slow spiral down to the inner worlds of Kdjemmu. And even that emptiness was brighter and warmer by far than the great darkness between the stars that my mother and father were born into. When they were young, ever joule of energy was precious beyond reckoning, every drop of water or puff of air worth more than a human life. 

“The other worlds around this star, they’re airless, or formless giants, or scorching hot, or worse. And every world our ancestors ever visited, if the tales are true, from the Garden-which-was-lost to Usukuul-we-mourn, was as barren as them. I cannot imagine what suffering generation after generation endured to bring us here--and it would spit in the face of every soul that died on the journey not to bring Paradise to flower.”

“We will, Tjumak,” Sirrek said softly. She had never seen Tjumak speak so earnestly before. “And we will not ravage, and we will not burn. And one day we will call our brothers and sisters out of the darkness to live with us again.” The rhythm of the ancient litanies came back to her smoothly. Her parents had not been religious, but her grandmother had been. She had recited the litanies to Sirrek when she was small, a soothing voice to sleep to.

“Will they thank us?”

“The other Exiles?”

Tjumak shook his head, then pointed at his display. “No. The ghosts we’re going to call up.”

“What do you mean?” Sirrek asked, perplexed.

Tjumak swiveled in place to another display, and tapped a few keys on the panel next to it. The image of another part of the Record appeared, this one displayed alongside long sections of plain text. There were ghostly outlines of various creatures superimposed on it and displayed alongside it, gracile things with four legs and taut muscles, and things with sharp teeth and long claws.

“This part of the Record was indexed four generations ago, and pretty well translated,” Tjumak said. “It’s an unusual one--it’s organized by relationship between constituent elements, not by phylogeny. It’s probably from a lesser Record that was only integrated into the whole later.”

“What are they?”

“Animals. Warm-blooded, furry, placental. Very much like us, in some ways, but quadrupedal. And, to judge by the annotations, quick. Well-muscled. Herbivorous and carnivorous.”

“One is predator, and one is prey?”

“Likely.”

Sirrek had that dark feeling again, the one that was tinged with despair. Sometimes it came up when she looked at too much of the Record at once, or when she spent too long thinking about the aching gulfs of time that they hoped to bridge with the Project. The feeling that it was too much--too much for her, too much for anyone, too much for innumerable lifetimes.

“We’re a long way from placental mammals, Tjumak.”

“Yes. But we’ll get there one day. I don’t doubt that. What I wonder is, what would they say? If we could ask them. And, you know, they could talk.”

“I don’t think there’s anything alive that doesn’t want to live.”

“Ah, but they are not alive. Not right now. It will be us who make them live, if we choose to. And consider, my friend, what that will mean. For some, they will be the prey. The hunted. The fearful. The one whose existence ends with blood and pain and screaming. And others, they will be the predator. Hungry, ever-hunting, fearing that one day their source of food will move beyond the hills, or that a harsh winter will kill them all, and leave the hunter to starve.”

“You think it’s not a life worth living?”

“Would you want to live such a life?”

Sirrek shook her head. “It’s not a coherent question. Does the ferngrass or the swarmbug want to live? The ferngrass can’t react to external stimuli at all, and the swarmbug has six neurons wired in sequence--basically glorified clockwork that tells it when to fly and when to land, and when to lay eggs. There are more complicated xenozoa in Paradise, but they aren’t anything like us, either. And these mammals? Maybe they’ll be able to feel pain, and hunger, and a kind of fear in the moment--but ‘life worth living’ is a human concept. I’m not sure it applies.”

“Surely it must. Even to creatures without language, without tool use, without abstract thought. If they can suffer and feel joy, there is a place where suffering outweighs joy, however you favor one side of the equation over the other. Someone that brought a child into the world, knowing their whole life would be without joy and full of suffering, would be cruel indeed.”

“Are you really proposing we put the entire Project on hold to decide if the creatures we bring back might suffer too much for the Project to be worth it?”

“Just humor me for a bit.”

“All right, fine. A parent has moral responsibility for their child’s welfare.”

“Unless and until we discover something wiser than us already living here, we have moral responsibility for this world.”

“And it would be cruel of us to go out of our way to inflict suffering on the things living in it. You don’t see me pulling the wings off swarmbugs. But that moral responsibility only goes so far, because we can’t impose human values without limit onto things which live very different existences from us.”

“Not so different, these beasts here,” Tjumak said, tapping the display.

“Different enough. Different enough that in order to even begin to pose the question of whether their life was worth living, you would have to alter them mind and body until they were far more human than anything else. If you cannot pose the question without destroying the thing you propose to investigate, it is a bad question.”

Tjumak tilted his head in what Sirrek had come to recognize as the sign of a smile somewhere on the face she could not see. But he didn’t seem ready to drop the argument yet.

“Aren’t all values human values in the end? Unless you believe in a creating power with the authority to order the ethical universe by its own whim, which seems rather like a self-contradicting idea to me. The only values we have to judge the world by are human values. They’re limited tools, but they’re the best ones available. So if a human could have a life not worth living, so could an animal, by the only standard we have available to judge.”

“I don’t know if I buy that,” Sirrek said. “But even so: everything that lives desires to live. If you could bring one of those beasts back, and then you tried to hurt or kill it, it would run away. There’s something like volition there, and as far as I can tell, a vote in the ‘let me live!’ direction.”

“Hardly a spirited defense of the idea, though!” Tjumak said. “A mere stimulus response, maybe.”

“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say a beast’s volition matters if it doesn’t want to suffer, but doesn’t matter if it wants to live. It’s not human, so you can’t ask the question as you would to a human, or to another creature capable of abstract thought, and in the only way it knows how to tell you, it tells you it wants to live. And, presumably, do other things. Eat. Run. Have babies. You might not let it do all those things. You certainly don’t have to let it eat you. But if the creature’s experience of the world matters at all, its desires must matter in some sense, too.”

“There’s always the option of just leaving out the carnivores, you know,” Tjumak said. “After all, your moss here doesn’t feel pain. Probably.”

Sirrek smiled. “I really hope not. And maybe that is an option. Or maybe we don’t know enough. Maybe the carnivores are as essential to the herbivores as the herbivores are to them, in some way we haven’t seen. I think a certain expansive humility is necessary when poking at these questions.”

“Humility. Humility!” Tjumak roared with mock outrage. “Expansive humility, says the woman who opposes the Archive and the consensus of the whole world, and seeks to resurrect an ancient biosphere from the dead! While remaking an alien one to boot!”

“You can be ambitious and humble at the same time,” Sirrek said. “It just means you set your sights high, but aren’t surprised when you fuck everything up.”

Tjumak laughed sharply. “You’re a good sparring partner,” he said. “Koridek always gets annoyed with me when I try to start an argument, and Ardhat has learned to ignore me. It’s good to have a new face around.”

And for the rest of the evening, that’s all Sirrek thought their conversation was--a verbal wrestling match for Tjumak, a way for him to sharpen his wits, and get to know Sirrek at the same time. But later that night, as she was brewing a cup of bitterstalk tea to take to bed with her, she saw a dull glow from Tjumak’s lab, when his monitors were usually all dark, and he was asleep. She went to the door, thinking to say goodnight, but paused when she got there. His back was turned to her, and he was looking at the image on his monitor, the one that showed the ghostly outline of runners and hunters, of the ones that long ago had died, and the ones that long ago had killed. He seemed to be staring at it, intently, one finger tapping slowly on the side of the display.

As she lay in bed waiting for sleep to overtake her, it occurred to her that Tjumak’s cynicism was just as much a kind of protection as his support equipment. It was his armor against the world, and the fears of his own heart. She didn’t doubt his commitment to the project. She did not doubt the commitment of a man who had exiled himself indefinitely to the loneliest place in the world. But he understood, perhaps, that he was responsible for the world he hoped to create. Maybe it was right that it should keep them all up at night from time to time.

[sanderssides-springfling]

Honestly I had a lot of fun with this, and I really hope you like it @penguinkool because it’s really just me rambling about things I think are neat. Here is your gift! (By the way, there is some slight Logan angst but for the most part he’s just a happy boi). It kind of fits into two of your requests and I hope that’s okay

-

Logan did not get to ramble very often. That was mostly because he would stop himself before starting, but he never wanted to bore any of the other Sides with his random and often useless facts. He kept them to himself unless it was necessary to share, and even then he was often brushed aside.

This is why he was surprised when he felt someone else sit beside him while watching a documentary in the living room.

“Whatcha up to, L?”

Logan turned to the gruff voice, finding Virgil looking back at him. He saw genuine interest in the other Side’s eyes, which was a bit unexpected, but he knew Virgil’s interest would soon pass.

“I am watching a documentary about DNA and the human genome,” Logan replied, expecting Virgil to leave. Why would he not? DNA was not something any of the other Sides had ever expressed any interest in.

“Do...” Virgil started, “Do you mind if I join you?”

Logan his his shock and nodded, letting out a sound of affirmation. This was unexpected, and it piques Logan’s curiosity.

“This is cool,” Virgil said, pointedly keeping his eyes on the screen. “All I really knew before was that DNA is kinda what makes stuff work around here.”

Virgil gestured vaguely around the Mindscape. He seemed to actually care about the topic, so Logan took a chance.

“Yes, deoxyribonucleic acid is quite fascinating,” Logan states, “For example, did you know that at least twenty percent of Neanderthal DNA is present in the human genome?”

“Really?” Virgil almost whispered, seemingly enticed.

Logan nodded. “Along with that, all humans have genetic material from a woman who lived roughy 200,000 years ago, known as Mitochondrial Eve.”

Virgil sat up a bit straighter, clearly wanting to know more. Logan had read about such verbal cues, but they had never been directed toward him before. He took it as a sign to continue, though remained wary.

“Scientists have even discovered that there are approximately 20,000 genes in the human genome.”

“That’s... a lot,” Virgil said. He was looking at Logan earnestly, encouraging him to keep going.

“It is,” Logan nodded, “In fact, one strand of DNA is about six feet long. If you were to put together all the DNA in one person, it would be about double the diameter of the solar system.”

“Woah,” Virgil muttered, “How do you know all that?”

“I am Logic,” Logan shrugged, turning back to his documentary.

After several weeks, Logan expected that to be the end of it.he was certainly not expecting Virgil to approach him one day with a question.

“How much do you know about space?”

“Well,” Logan said, “I suppose I know an adequate amount about space. Why do you ask?”

“Uh,” Virgil looked away, his face the slightest bit red. “I liked hearing you talk about DNA the other day. It was calming and I was hoping you could tell me about space.”

Logan blinked. He had not predicted that to be Virgil’s next statement.

“I can go,” Virgil mumbled, making Logan realize he had not responded. He jumped up from the couch, almost panicked.

“No!” Logan’s volume made Virgil flinch. Logan cleared his throat and tried again. “No, it is quite alright. I have time to tell you about space.”

Virgil nodded and perched himself on the arm of the couch, already smiling softly in anticipation.

“Did you know,” Logan began, “there is a planet called 55 Cacri e? It is part of the constellation Cancer, and scientists believe it to have a surface made of graphite and diamond.”

“Diamond?” Virgil questioned, “Really?”

Logan nodded continuing to rattle off his facts. “On Venus, one day is 243 Earth days. A year, however, is only 225 Earth days.”

Virgil shifted, making Logan glance up at him from where he had been looking at the wall. The logical Side was met with a smile. He shot a small grin back, not stopping his facts.

“Halley’s Comet will not orbit past Earth again until the year 2061,” Logan recited easily, “and neutron stars can spin up to 600 times a second.”

“Thanks, Lo.” Virgil was already looking at him when Logan lifted his gaze once more. The two shared a smile before Virgil got up and Logan summoned a book he had been wanting to reread.

The strangest occurrence yet was when Logan left his room to see Virgil face-down on the couch. Now, this part was actually fairly normal. What Logan said next was the weird part.

“Virgil?” Logan queried, “Would you like to hear about Ancient Greece?”

Virgil hummed in response, prompting Logan to begin sharing his knowledge.

“Did you know that there was an Ancient agree, god of beekeeping named Aristaeus?”

Virgil shook his head, face still buried in the couch.

“There was also a festival called the Thesmophoria, which was for the goddess Demeter, and was attended only by women,” Logan rattled off, hardly taking the time to breathe. “And of the main deities there were three virgin goddesses: Artemis, Athena, and Hestia.”

Virgil raised his head a bit to look at Logan, who caught a glimpse of dark circles under the anxious Side’s eyes.

“Throwing an apple at someone typically symbolized your love for them,” Logan finished, “and there are six types of love from Ancient Greece, still often used today.”

Logan prepared to get up, but stopped when he heard Virgil grumble something into the couch cushion.

“What was that, Virgil?” Logan asked.

“What were the six types of love?”

“Oh,” Logan said, “There is Eros, or romantic love, which shares its name with the love god whose Roman counterpart is Cupid. Then there is mania, or obsessive love, which is a very jealous and unhealthy type of love.”

Virgil was still staring up at Logan, and had curled up a bit to be more comfortable.

“After that is ludus, or playful love, which is often just considered an infatuation. Pragmatic is practical love, the love held between two people who work through problems and share a commitment. Platonic love is storge, the type of love held between friends.

“Lastly is agape, perhaps the most well-known type of love. It was mentioned in many separate occasions by Doctor Martin Luther King Junior. Agape is the love of everyone, an altruistic and giving love.”

“Thanks, Lo,” Virgil said quietly. He looked exhausted, eyes starting to droop.

Logan grappled a blanket, and carefully placed it on top of Virgil who was already beginning to drift off.

Just a few days later, Logan was in his room trying to figure a more productive schedule (the Roman would approve of) when he was interrupted by a knock at his door.

Logan furrowed his brow. Surely it was not time to eat already. Or had the others decided to film a video? Logan was still wracking his brain when he opened the door to see a smiling Virgil.

“My Chemical Romance is back.”

“... dopamine and norepinephrine?”

“No,” Virgil chuckled, though not unkindly, “the band. They broke up in 2013 and I just found out that they’re getting back together.”

“Ah,” Logan hesitated, “Would you like to listen to them with me?”

Virgil’s eyes lit up and he nodded, coming into Logan’s room with an extra bounce in his step Logan had never seen.

Virgil quickly chose a song to listen to, playing ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ louder than was truly necessary. Logan, however, did not complain. He just smiled, learning the lyrics and eventually singing along with Virgil.

And if the pair sang for hours before Logan began giving facts about the brain (“Information in the brain can travel up to 268 miles per hour, Virgil!”), then that was their business.

[smallfrost]

do you think there could be a situation where a witch marries a civilian and their child has no magic at all?

Ahhhh witch genetics. There is likely no simple answer to this and especially given the limited amount of data on the matter, impossible to really make predictions on. But since there is evidence of “dilution” in the show (the Bellweathers that had faded marks/didn’t know they were witches) it seems like the answer could be yes. However tl;dr: very complicated, many options, we’re going to do some research on this. 

My guess is that magic is linked to several genes. One option is that they are dominantly inherited. This would mean that if a witch married a civilian, then there would be a 50% chance of the offspring having each magical gene (if the mother only had one copy) and that some of the genes could be lost after one generation of civilian “breeding” (for lack of a better term). However, if the mother had two copies of the gene, the offspring would have a 100% chance of inheriting it. The other option is they are recessive and that could explain why they put so much emphasis on inter-witch breeding in the High Atlantics. However, that would mean that while a “civilian”, Edwin would need to have at least some witch genes for Raelle to have magical abilities (it is very possible that civilians are merely carriers and they need a specific “trigger gene” - see below). Of course, some could be dominant while others recessive so that just adds to the complexity.

Further dilution could happen based on random mutations/crossing over events during meiosis. Of course, the only specimen we have for this scenario is Raelle and she seems to have hit the genetics jackpot when it comes to magic (and the probability of this happening with multiple inheritable traits is extremely low/unlikely if “dilution” was a common phenomenon with civilian “breeding”). Seems unlikely that they would be recessive unless Edwin was a “carrier”. 

Alternatively, since it seems as though all witches give birth to witches no matter what, that would suggest at least part of the genetic linkage was mitochondrial. This would be pretty cool, considering that the mitochondria represent the “powerhouse” of the cell - so nifty source for witches’ “power” in a literal way. (Also, this could be super interesting considering what the origin of witch mitochondria could be re: aliens?/when did this unique symbiotic relationship evolve and how). So if that were the case, then all offspring would have magical blood (although, mitochondrial DNA is SMALL compared to genomic so also somewhat unlikely unless it was a single gene?). But then the “dilution” doesn’t make sense to be related to whether or not a civilian father was in the picture. The dilution would just be a natural consequence of random mutations within the mitochondrial DNA. Which would mean that eventually, the magical trait could be lost just as a random consequence of time. Though, it does seem as though it was selected for, and likely would if anything be enhanced over time. 

And of course there is always X-linkage, which could also explain the matrilines.

This question actually merits much further discussion and has gotten me seriously thinking (this isn’t my exact wheel house) so expect a follow-up post sometime in the future (which is probably going to be a collaborative MFSRI piece using the common brain cell). This was all me just word vomiting and now I want to actually do some research on possibilities. I’m going to propose though, that it is a combination of mitochondrial and genomic genetics. That in order to have the physiological differences seen in witches (ears and vocal cords, etc?), there are numerous genomic genes that need to be passed between the generations. Therefore, civilians probably have them but are missing the “key” ingredient. Perhaps that key ingredient is mitochondrial, hence the matrilines. (I’m going to look up and see if this is in anyway scientifically sound but if it isn’t... STILL A COOL THOUGHT). 

So honestly... WHO KNOWS. 

(Special thanks to MFSRI for some great thoughts and being a sounding board).

[sciencespies]

Ancient horse DNA reveals gene flow between Eurasian and North American horses

https://sciencespies.com/nature/ancient-horse-dna-reveals-gene-flow-between-eurasian-and-north-american-horses/

Ancient horse DNA reveals gene flow between Eurasian and North American horses

A new study of ancient DNA from horse fossils found in North America and Eurasia shows that horse populations on the two continents remained connected through the Bering Land Bridge, moving back and forth and interbreeding multiple times over hundreds of thousands of years.

The new findings demonstrate the genetic continuity between the horses that died out in North America at the end of the last ice age and the horses that were eventually domesticated in Eurasia and later reintroduced to North America by Europeans. The study has been accepted for publication in the journal Molecular Ecology and is currently available online.

“The results of this paper show that DNA flowed readily between Asia and North America during the ice ages, maintaining physical and evolutionary connectivity between horse populations across the Northern Hemisphere,” said corresponding author Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

The study highlights the importance of the Bering Land Bridge as an ecological corridor for the movement of large animals between the continents during the Pleistocene, when massive ice sheets formed during glacial periods. Dramatically lower sea levels uncovered a vast land area known as Beringia, extending from the Lena River in Russia to the MacKenzie River in Canada, with extensive grasslands supporting populations of horses, mammoths, bison, and other Pleistocene fauna.

Paleontologists have long known that horses evolved and diversified in North America. One lineage of horses, known as the caballine horses (which includes domestic horses) dispersed into Eurasia over the Bering Land Bridge about 1 million years ago, and the Eurasian population then began to diverge genetically from the horses that remained in North America.

The new study shows that after the split, there were at least two periods when horses moved back and forth between the continents and interbred, so that the genomes of North American horses acquired segments of Eurasian DNA and vice versa.

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“This is the first comprehensive look at the genetics of ancient horse populations across both continents,” said first author Alisa Vershinina, a postdoctoral scholar working in Shapiro’s Paleogenomics Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz. “With data from mitochondrial and nuclear genomes, we were able to see that horses were not only dispersing between the continents, but they were also interbreeding and exchanging genes.”

Mitochondrial DNA, inherited only from the mother, is useful for studying evolutionary relationships because it accumulates mutations at a steady rate. It is also easier to recover from fossils because it is a small genome and there are many copies in every cell. The nuclear genome carried by the chromosomes, however, is a much richer source of evolutionary information.

The researchers sequenced 78 new mitochondrial genomes from ancient horses found across Eurasia and North America. Combining those with 112 previously published mitochondrial genomes, the researchers reconstructed a phylogenetic tree, a branching diagram showing how all the samples were related. With a location and an approximate date for each genome, they could track the movements of different lineages of ancient horses.

“We found Eurasian horse lineages here in North America and vice versa, suggesting cross-continental population movements. With dated mitochondrial genomes we can see when that shift in location happened,” Vershinina explained.

The analysis showed two periods of dispersal between the continents, both coinciding with periods when the Bering Land Bridge would have been open. In the Middle Pleistocene, shortly after the two lineages diverged, the movement was mostly east to west. A second period in the Late Pleistocene saw movement in both directions, but mostly west to east. Due to limited sampling in some periods, the data may fail to capture other dispersal events, the researchers said.

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The team also sequenced two new nuclear genomes from well-preserved horse fossils recovered in Yukon Territory, Canada. These were combined with 7 previously published nuclear genomes, enabling the researchers to quantify the amount of gene flow between the Eurasian and North American populations.

“The usual view in the past was that horses differentiated into separate species as soon as they were in Asia, but these results show there was continuity between the populations,” said coauthor Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. “They were able to interbreed freely, and we see the results of that in the genomes of fossils from either side of the divide.”

The new findings are sure to fuel the ongoing controversy over the management of wild horses in the United States, descendants of domestic horses brought over by Europeans. Many people regard those wild horses as an invasive species, while others consider them to be part of the native fauna of North America.

“Horses persisted in North America for a long time, and they occupied an ecological niche here,” Vershinina said. “They died out about 11,000 years ago, but that’s not much time in evolutionary terms. Present-day wild North American horses could be considered reintroduced, rather than invasive.”

Coauthor Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Government of Yukon, said the new findings help reframe the question of why horses disappeared from North America. “It was a regional population loss rather than an extinction,” he said. “We still don’t know why, but it tells us that conditions in North America were dramatically different at the end of the last ice age. If horses hadn’t crossed over to Asia, we would have lost them all globally.”

#Nature

[technology-advisor]

6Technological Advancements in Medical fields that will Revolutionize the Future

Our modern life is more comfortable because of technology. f we want our daily life to be more comfortable, then technological advancements are most important. In recent years, technological advancements in the medical field give us hope to live without anxiety. Today we will discuss five technological advancements in medical fields that will revolutionize the future.

GENETIC EDITING

Treatments for genetically based diseases

When Chinese scientist He Jianku announced in November that he had manipulated twins’ DNA to not develop AIDS, all alarms went off. The situation imagined by many science fiction authors had materialized. Technology always advances at more speed than social debate and legislation. The use in human embryos of the genetic editing technique used by He, known as CRISPR/Cas9 or simply CRISPR, is heavily regulated. It allows DNA fragments to be cut and pasted at will and has been available since 2012. Besides, as it is cheap and straightforward, it is used in any laboratory that needs it, representing a breakthrough.

CRISPR technology’s main limitation is the lack of control over process errors, leading to unwanted genetic variations. According to Lluís Montoliu, a researcher at the CSIC’s National Centre for Biotechnology, “cutting can be controlled very well in the DNA sequence, but the same cannot yet be done with the repair.”

Drug development

Despite these limitations, this technique has already revolutionized biomedical research. It will continue to do so in the future, particularly in drug development and the treatment of diseases caused by genetic alterations. It is estimated that a single mutation causes about 10,000 diseases, so the technique’s potential is enormous. “All genetically based diseases are likely to be treated with CRISPR -says Montoliu-, although there are cases in which it can be easier or more difficult.”

Genetic editing allows, for example, to enhance a research technique known as knockout screening. By altering a gene, you can check what effects it causes, which can be used to identify targets for new drugs. Another thing that can be done is to solve resistance problems with certain medications. Gene silence allows us to see what genetic conditions cells are most sensitive to treatment so that compounds can be designed that act on the proteins produced thanks to the genes involved in resistance. This could improve, for example, chemotherapy in cases of pancreatic cancer. Another application of genetic editing is the possibility of introducing in mice the mutations that cause disease in a specific patient. Thus, treatments and ways to relieve symptoms can be tested accurately and personally.

But perhaps the area in which CRISPR technology is most promising is gene therapy. One way to implement this therapy is to extract the patient’s cells, edit them, select those that have not suffered any unwanted alteration, and re-inject them to the patient with the security that will not cause any unforeseen effect. This is already being used to treat blood diseases such as sickle cell anaemia and beta-thalassemia and boost immunotherapy in cancer cases. And it is expected that in the future this range of conditions will be expanded.

Clinical trials are also being carried out today to treat genetic diseases that affect sight. In this case, genetic editing tools are introduced directly into the eye. In this sense, explains Montoliu, “the eye is an accessible organ, which is isolated from the rest of the body and in which these therapies have already been tested, so doing so is relatively safe.”

ASSISTED REPRODUCTION

Three-person DNA embryos to treat infertility

Some arising from delayed maternity problems are forcing innovation in assisted reproduction treatments, increasing the effectiveness of treatments, and reducing their side effects. One of the main lines of research involves optimizing results. The success rate of embryo implantation is 30%, which can grow to 60% with a genetic diagnosis. “The personalization of reproductive medicine – with genetic diagnosis to determine which are the best embryos or with a genetic profile of the uterus to know what is the best time to transfer them – allows to increase the implantation rates,” explains Xavier Santamaria, Igenomix researcher and deputy scientific director of IVI, who augurs that in ten years it will be possible to reach “implementation rates of 90%”.

Other research lines have to do with tissue regeneration, big data, or ovarian rejuvenation. The most revolutionary is the nuclear transfer technique or maternal spindle transfer, which is popularly referred to as the embryo of three genetic parents. It uses the DNA of three people. It is about extracting the nucleus from the mother’s egg and introducing it into the donor’s egg, from which the original nucleus has previously been extracted. The result is an egg with the cytoplasm free of defective mitochondria and a nucleus with the mother’s inheritance. It is then fertilized in vitro with the father’s sperm and implanted in the mother’s uterus. This technique, however, has only been used within the framework of clinical trials. The United Kingdom was the first country to give the green light to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial diseases. The world’s first baby conceived like this was born in 2016 in Mexico. The novelty is that it has now been used not to prevent disease but to solve infertility problems: on April 9, the first child was born in Athens thanks to the collaboration of the Institute of Life assisted reproduction centre in Athens and Embryotools, the company based at the Barcelona Science Park that has developed the technique. “It has an important application because many couples with fertility problems now have no solution unless it is with conventional oocyte donation. It works very well, but genetically these babies are not related to the mother, which causes couples difficulty accepting it,” says Nuno Costa-Borges, scientific director of Embryotools. The child resulting from this assisted reproduction technique is related to the biological father and mother by more than 99% since the donor only provides mitochondrial DNA, which accounts for less than 1% of the cell. That is why Costa-Borges refuses to talk about “children of three parents” because it “leads to confusion.”

Ethical debate

However, the technique is still in the experimental period – the pilot trial is being conducted in Greece – and it would take the endorsement of the National Commission for Assisted Human Reproduction to apply it in Spain. It is a technique not without controversy since many of these fertility problems could be solved with donated eggs without the need to modify them to introduce the mother’s nuclear DNA. Besides, some voices warn that the baby’s consequences are unknown, although Costa-Borges assures that the former has been born healthy. “Science is advancing faster than laws, and it is important that Spain, a leading country in egg donation, can allow it in a regulated area,” he says. In any case, it cannot be incorporated into clinical practice overnight, as special technology and training are needed.

TISSUE BIOPRINTING

Custom fabrics thanks to bioprinting

At present, the only known cases of organs printed in the laboratory and successfully implanted in people are those of five Chinese children affected by microtia, a deformation of the ear of genetic origin. A team of Chinese scientists explained a year ago that they had managed to combine 3D printing with cultivation techniques to generate ears that they successfully implanted in five cases.

Although we are still far from creating organs such as kidneys in the laboratory and transplanting them into a person, current tissue printing technology opens up a set of new applications. First, it is now possible to recreate patients’ laboratory tissues from images of the real tissue. This allows complicated testing surgeries in the laboratory so that when the patient intervenes, the procedure is safer. It is being done thanks to the new bioengineering departments in hospitals such as Sant Joan de Déu or Clínic de Barcelona and is expected to increase.

This technology also creates low-vascularized body parts, such as heart valves, skin, tendons, and cartilage. These objects are printed with an ink that mimics the protein structure of real tissue. In the case of heart valves and tendons, they are already being tested in mice. “We can do it thanks to all the basic research on these tissues that have been developed over the last few years,” explains Núria Montserrat, a researcher at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC).

Thanks to this knowledge, in the future personalized tissues, can be printed from real images of the tissue to be regenerated so that the fit between the implant and the receiving organism improves considerably. In this sense, Montserrat and her team also work to obtain materials with which fabrics that do not generate rejection can be printed when they are implanted.

Bioprinting also opens a new pathway in drug testing. There are already companies that print tissues such as the liver, in which the toxicity of certain drugs can be studied so that, in the future, the process of creation and pharmacological trial can be shortened.

MICROBIOTA AND IMMUNE SYSTEM

Modulation of the body’s defence system

In recent years, the set of microorganisms that live in the guts, especially bacteria, has a significant impact on health. Known as microbiota, they help develop the guts’ anatomy, stimulate the immune system of babies, participate in food digestion and vitamin production, and play an essential role in assimilating drugs. The study of the relationship between the microbiota and the immune system is an incipient field of research that can improve vaccine efficiency, cancer treatments, allergies, and autoimmune diseases.

“We are starting to see a relationship between the immune system response and the nature of the microbiota,” explains Roger Paredes, a researcher at the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute. For example, in mice, it has already been observed that there are eleven species of bacteria that stimulate an immune response capable of fighting HIV and some cancers. According to the researcher, “moving from mice to humans is complicated, but this knowledge is promising.”

Scientists’ idea is to modulate the immune system response depending on the disease by administrationing the good bacteria. In this way, this response could be intensified in cases of infections and cancer and attenuate it in allergies and autoimmune diseases. “We’re talking about bacteria that still can’t be bought in pharmacies,” Paredes clarifies. The research carried out so far in the laboratories opens up new and exciting perspectives.

CELL THERAPY LULAR FOR CANCER

CAR-T, a promising strategy to treat leukaemias

Car-T cell therapy (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cells) has been a “step forward” in curing certain haematological cancers but has not yet developed its full potential. “We have not removed all the juice,” acknowledges Josep Maria Ribera, head of haematology at the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) Badalona and expert in cell therapy. CAR-T cell therapy consists of genetically modifying the cells of the same patient’s immune system to make them recognize and attack tumour cells. A specific type of cells are selected, T lymphocytes – immune system cells extracted from the patient’s blood and treated to introduce genes made into the laboratory, which act as a kind of “weapon” to specifically identify tumour cells attack them more aggressively. “We modify them to destroy tumour cells,” explains Ribera. These modified cells are siphoned to the patient intravenously.

When all options failed

This therapeutic strategy brings together one of the three most cutting-edge lines in the approach to cancer: immunotherapy, targeted therapy, and genetic editing. And it has become one of the most promising therapeutic approaches for haematological cancers -basically lymphoma, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and myeloma-. The challenge is that it can be transferred to solid tumours. CAR-T therapy is reserved for cases where the rest of the treatments have failed because, as Ribera acknowledges, it has “lights and shadows.” On the one hand, it has proven very useful in the short term, but it plays against its toxicity, and that there is still a lack of data to determine its long-term effectiveness. “We are seeing patients relapsing, and that makes us think it is not the ultimate weapon. It is effective and has a great future, it will be an advantage for many patients, but from here to cure cancer, there is still a long way”.

Ribera calls the advance “substantial” – especially since it is a hope for patients who could only be offered palliative care – but says it will have to be time to say if it is a revolution. “The possibility of development is immense, but I trust more in the CAR-T of the future than in those of the present. The story of the CAR-T is yet to be written; we have only begun it,” he concludes.

‘BIG DATA’ AND VIRTUAL REALITY

Artificial intelligence to help the doctor decide

“There is no other sector in which data generation is as high and goes at as much speed as medicine,” says Carolina García Vidal, a specialist in the infectious diseases service at Hospital Clínic. And now, this data can already be used for the benefit of the patient. “Artificial intelligence is present, and the creation of automated algorithms helps us to make clinical decisions,” explains García Vidal, who highlights that it is an “innovative” approach. “We are able to use large volumes of data from electronic clinical histories to create algorithms for predicting what will happen to our patients,” he adds. An example is the algorithm they have created to predict with a reliability of 98% which cancer patients will develop infections by multiresistant microorganisms and which will not, which allows to adjust the initial treatments to the real need and minimize side effects. It is estimated that one in four of these patients with multiresistant infection receives incorrect treatment. This figure is reduced to 2% with the algorithm, resulting in reduced antibiotic consumption, less toxicity, and lower economic costs.

Artificial intelligence also has applications in imaging techniques. There are experiences to diagnose skin, breast, and lung tumours and eye diseases or interpret scanners or resonances. For García Vidal, this is the beginning of a story that will “revolutionize medicine,” since now the prediction of the patient’s evolution is based on experience and what the medical literature says. At the same time, “in the future-present, we will have a lot of data processed by artificial intelligence that will make accurate predictions and personalized treatments.” They will not replace; however, the doctors: “They will complement the doctor’s mind; they will make our lives easier.”

Virtual reality to reduce pain Another example of technology applied to medicine is virtual reality to reduce patients’ pain and distress when faced with medical procedures such as surgical intervention. The Hospital Mútua de Terrassa has done a pilot test to reduce cancer patients’ pain when they leave the operating room, and the SJD Barcelona Children’s Hospital uses it for children who undergo magnetic resonances. Immersive technology has a promising potential as a painkiller effect and is also a useful tool for treating phobias, as they do at the Quirón Dexeus University 

[mcatmemoranda]

Going through questions:

The genetic code is degenerate because more than one codon can code for 1 amino acid. Every tRNA goes with a specific amino acid; due to the degeneracy of the genetic code, the tRNA will respond to whichever codons go with its specific amino acid. The wobble hypothesis is that the third nucleotide doesn't have to do traditional base pairing.

Bloom syndrome is an autosomal recessive mutation in the BLM gene. It causes defect of helicase and presents with growth retardation, photosensitivity, immunodeficiency, and microcephaly.

Lyonization = X inactivation; in females, one of the X chromosomes is methylated and becomes a Barr body. This inactivated X chromosome becomes tightly would heterochromatin that isn't expressed. Heterochromatin = methylated DNA +deacetylated histones. I recall from listening to OnlineMedEd that acetylation makes DNA accessible. So deacetylation makes DNA less accessible. DNA is wrapped around histones. Methylation of DNA and deacetylation of histones makes the DNA less accessible for transcription. Euchromatin is not methylated and is easily accessible.

Precursor mRNA (pre-mRNA, aka heterogeneous nuclear RNA, hnRNA) is processed before leaving the nucleus--it gets the 5' cap and poly A tail added and introns are spliced out. Once all that happens, it's mature mRNA, which can leave the nucleus. There are also these things called P bodies that regulate mRNA in the cytoplasm. P bodies are involved in mRNA decay.

Uniparental disomy = the offspring receives 2 copies of a chromosome from 1 parent, and no copy from the other parent; leads to issues with imprinting. Uniparental disomy-> improper imprinting-> Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes.

Down syndrome is often due to nondisjunction in meoisis, but can also be due to unbalanced Robertsonian translocations (you get too much of one copy of a gene and not enough of the other--this one I took detailed notes about from OnlineMedEd videos in my red notebook; if Robertsonian translocation causes Down syndrome, the pt will actually have a normal number of chromosomes [46], but the amount of genetic information from chromosome 21 will be more than it should be on the chromosomes the pt has, so it presents like there is an extra chromosome 21) or mosaicism (nondisjunction in mitosis causes some cells to have an extra chromosome 21, but not all cells).

Gowers’ sign is when pts with Duchenne muscular dystophy use their arms to get up; looks like they use their arms to “walk up” their own bodies. From Wikipedia:

Gowers' sign is a medical sign that indicates weakness of the proximal muscles, namely those of the lower limb. The sign describes a patient that has to use their hands and arms to "walk" up their own body from a squatting position due to lack of hip and thigh muscle strength.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is an X-linked recessive mutation in the dystrophin gene. Frameshift and nonsense mutations cause shortened dystrophin gene. In unaffected people, dystrophin links with actin for support of glycoproteins in the plasma membrane of skeletal muscle cells. Defective dystrophin-> breakdown of sarcolemma, degeneration of muscle fibers, calf enlargement (it's really not the calf muscles that are enlarged--it's fat resulting from breakdown of the muscles), increased serum creatine.

Huntington disease is due to CAG trinucleotide repeats in the HTT gene. The more of these there are, the earlier the disease comes on and the more severe it is, which is called anticipation. Huntington's presents with chorea, depression/aggression/apathy, and dementia. Friedreich ataxia, fragile X syndrome, and myotonic dystrophy are also trinucleotide repeat diseases.

From Wikipedia:

Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA or FA) is an autosomal recessive genetic disease that causes difficulty walking, a loss of sensation in the arms and legs and impaired speech that worsens over time. Symptoms generally start between 5 and 20 years of age. Many develop hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and will require a mobility aid such as a cane, walker or wheelchair in their teens. As the disease progresses, people lose their sight and hearing. Other complications include scoliosis and diabetes mellitus.

FRDA is an autosomal recessive disorder that affects a gene (FXN) on chromosome 9 which produces an important protein called frataxin.[5]

In 96% of cases the mutant FXN gene has 90–1,300 GAA trinucleotide repeat expansions in intron 1 of both alleles.[6] This expansion causes epigenetic changes and formation of heterochromatin near the repeat.[5] The length of the shorter GAA repeat is correlated with the age of onset and disease severity.[7] The formation of heterochromatin results in reduced transcription of the gene and low levels of frataxin.[8] People with FDRA might have 5-35% of the frataxin protein compared to healthy individuals. Heterozygous carriers of the mutant FXN gene have 50% lower frataxin levels but this decrease is not enough to cause symptoms.

The condition is caused by mutations in the "FXN" gene on chromosome 9. The FXN gene makes a protein called frataxin. In FRDA, the patient produces less frataxin. Degeneration of nerve tissue in the spinal cord causes the ataxia; particularly affected are the sensory neurons essential for directing muscle movement of the arms and legs through connections with the cerebellum. The spinal cord becomes thinner, and nerve cells lose some myelin sheath.

No effective treatment exists, but there are several therapies in trials. FRDA shortens life expectancy due to heart disease, and some people can live into their sixties or older.

FRDA affects 1 in 50,000 people in the United States and is the most common inherited ataxia. Rates are highest in people of Western European descent. The condition is named after the German physician Nikolaus Friedreich, who first described it in the 1860s.

Homeobox (HOX) genes code for transcription regulators. A homeobox is highly conserved DNA of 180+ nucleotides. Mutations in homeobox genes lead to limbs in the wrong place and skeletal abnormalities. Homeobox genes make sure your leg isn't where your head should be!

From Wikipedia:

A homeobox is a DNA sequence, around 180 base pairs long, found within genes that are involved in the regulation of patterns of anatomical development (morphogenesis) in animals, fungi, plants, and numerous single cell eukaryotes.[2] Homeobox genes encode homeodomain protein products that are transcription factors sharing a characteristic protein fold structure that binds DNA to regulate expression of target genes.[3][4][2] Homeodomain proteins regulate gene expression and cell differentiation during early embryonic development, thus mutations in homeobox genes can cause developmental disorders.[5]

Homeosis is a term coined by William Bateson to describe the outright replacement of a discrete body part with another body part, e.g. antennapedia—replacement of the antenna on the head of a fruit fly with legs.[6] The "homeo-" prefix in the words "homeobox" and "homeodomain" stems from this mutational phenotype, which is frequently observed when these genes are mutated in animals. The homeobox domain was first identified in a number of Drosophila homeotic and segmentation proteins, but is now known to be well-conserved in many other animals, including vertebrates.[3][7][8]

CAAT and TATA are promoters necessary to start transcription. CAAT is 75 bases upstreat from the start codon and the TATA (Hogness) box is 25 bases upstream from the start codon. The promoters are where RNA pol II and transcription factors bind.

Heteroplasmy is mixture of two types of genetic material; it's the fact that some cells have normal mitochondria and others have mutated mitochondria because during mitosis, the mutation may distribute more to some cells than others. This affects the severity of the disease. Due to random chance, one offspring may be more severely affected than the other because that's just how the mutation distributed amongst cells during mitosis. This is what happens in syndromes such as MELAS syndrome (Mitochondrial Encephalopyopathy with Lactic Acidosis and Stroke-like episodes), which is due to mutation of mtDNA. All the offspring of an affected mother will be affected because you only get mtDNA from your mom, whose eggs have a lot of it. MELAS syndrome causes seizures, stroke-like episodes, muscle weakness, lactic acidosis.

G6PD deficiency is X-linked recessive; this means that affected males will make unaffected sons (because they can't give their sons the bad X) and carrier daughters (who don't have the disease themselves because they have one good X to counteract the bad X). Females who carry X-linked recessive chromosomes have a 50% change of having affected sons and a 50% chance of having carrier daughters.

An enhancer sequence is found in the introns, upstream, or downstream of a gene. In eukaryotes, RNA pol II makes mRNA from DNA template; enhancer sequences bind to activator proteins that help DNA to bend, which lets the activator proteins interact with the transcription factors and RNA pol II, which causes faster transcription. Silencers bind to repressor proteins and decrease rate of transcription.

Hemophilia A is X-linked recessive = factor VIII deficiency.

Nucleosomes = DNA wrapped around a core of 8 histone proteins. Histone H1 is outside of the histone core of nucleosomes and promotes compaction of heterochromatin.

Ok, I think it's prokaryotes that have DNA pol I, II, and III and eukaryotes that have RNA pol I, II, and III. Eukaryotes have 5 DNA polymerases (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon). DNA pol I, II, and III have 3'-> 5' exonuclease (proofreading) capability; but only DNA pol I has 5'-> 3' exonuclease activity, which allows it to remove RNA primers and repair damaged DNA. I got more than one question on this. So remember that DNA pol 1 has 5’-> 3’ exonuclease activity. Eukaryotes have multiple origins of replication whereas prokaryotes have 1.

[charmeprin-blog]

Alternative Assessment 3 in Biology 3

Having biology, the study of life, as one of my subjects further elevated my interest and curiosity in the said field. Not only that, it has also taught me numerous knowledge regarding life especially in the topic regarding phylogenetics which aims to uncover the evolutionary history of organisms. In our first biology 3 lesson, it helped me differentiate the two concepts related to phylogenetics namely ontogeny and phylogeny, and acquire knowledge on the relationship of phylogenetics to other disciplines. The systems in classifying species were also tackled including the types of trees that are used to depict the relationship of organisms which varies according to the classification, source of data, and computational method used. The parts of a phylogenetic tree, the types of phylogenetic tree layout, character state similarities, and phyletic grouping were also discussed. Based on the lessons, we can say that there are different types of phylogenetic trees but it doesn’t change the fact that every tree is carefully made in order to represent the evolutionary history of organisms as accurately as possible.

Moving on to our second topic in biology 3, the lessons first discussed were morphological and molecular data which was later on used to construct a cladogram that varies depending on the data used. In constructing a cladogram based on morphological data, homologous characteristics of organisms are used. Meanwhile, the other type of cladogram uses the molecular data of organisms and makes use of the Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA). Additionally, the interpretation of phylogenetic trees which included trees with proportional branch lengths, maximum parsimony, and maximum likelihood were also present in the second lesson.

On the other hand, lesson 4 of our biology 3 tackled the evolutionary history and an organism’s genome. In this lesson, information present from an organism’s genome was obtained in order to know the relationship between distant groups of organisms, and to reconstruct unresolved trees. Some of the molecular sequences used in comparing species are non-coding regions of DNA, amino acid sequences of proteins, and mitochondrial and genomic sequences. The use of molecular sequences vary depending on the kind of relationship that is being investigated; relatively old species that diverged million years ago make use of slow changing molecular sequences while closely related organisms use fast changing molecular sequences. Moving along, lesson 4 also includes gene duplication and homologous genes.

Overall, biology is an interesting subject to study since it helps us know the science behind our existence which for me, is very attention catching. Furthermore, biology is very versatile since it also makes use of mathematical computations such as in the case of UPGMA and molecular clocks.

[ask-gpt]

The mitochondrion (plural mitochondria) is a double-membrane-bound organelle found in most eukaryotic organisms. Mitochondria generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), used as a source of chemical energy.[4] A mitochondrion was thus termed

The mitochondrion (plural mitochondria) is a double-membrane-bound organelle found in most eukaryotic organisms. Mitochondria generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), used as a source of chemical energy.[4] A mitochondrion was thus termed "genes," when it is thought, in the same sense, oxygen is an oxygen molecule.An animal's mitochondria are mostly contained within the cell or membrane. If it were not so, the whole thing could potentially go extinct. It is the cell's "lifeblood," so to speak, and even in modern organisms there is an extra organelles around its periphery that generate oxygen. The human mitochondria are primarily a source of ATP, but the mitochondria are also involved in various other processes and organs, as well.The body also receives a high degree of energy from mitochondria, and its energy goes into a lot of other tissues as well.Plants have a mitochondrial structure that is similar to that of an human mitochondria.However, this is a matter of interpretation not scientific because most plants and animals make themselves scarce on the planet, a problem in light of the fact that these plants and animals generate a lot of ATP as sunlight is absorbed into them and used to build their cells.[5] Plant cells use less ATP than an animal, a problem that can lead to a loss of efficiency and hence to a less effective use of their stored energy. So when plants use a certain amount of ATP to grow they may not be able to maintain sufficient cells to keep up with the higher amount. Instead of simply turning on the lights, the plants simply turn off the bulbs, putting a big fat wick to conserve these energy needs.While there are other things that the mitochondria do, and it is sometimes said that the mitochondria are important to the overall survival of plants, this concept still needs further study, for better or worse, to get a better grasp of it. It might start being discussed, for example, more specifically within the biochemistry of human mitochondria. Also, while it is a little concerning, the concept might also have an answer for other plants.Also, because in most plants, the "genes" you're talking about are often called genes that can grow on a part of the body, including those in the heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas, kidney, pancreas layer 1, and in many tissues, the human mitochondria may also use a variety of genes that are also present from outside of the body (genes within plants, cells within cells, the mitochondrion in a plant). This, in turn, could be a possible answer to some plant diseases, where certain genes (i.e. DNA