The tittle is a little exaggerated for what the post is about.
I read a paper published on 2009 so it's old, however i found it interesting.
Reflecting upon it, led me to the next train of thought:
We are aware that in our knowledge as humans, there are still great gaps, and we are yet to unravel nature's mysteries. The universe reminds us of our unmatured minds everytime it throws data that contradicts previous established dogmas, and we experience a paradigm shift or change.
Even so, in my opinion the paramount of science is far away but our knowledge is still advanced, sometimes i think it might be too advanced. The way of how biological systems are unable to cope with the changes provoked by our advances is an indicator of that.
Nonetheless we keep pressing forward. But in reality we must recognize our dependency on machines, since with these paper one can see that without computers our minds are not ready to process all the information we generate, however unlike our fellow machines we are able to interpret the processed data.
The paper compares protein families of different phylums that have their species completely sequenced. It then concludes something we all know but no one had processed and published, that protein families are greater as the number of genomes increase in a phylum.... seems logical huh?
But something really amazing when the group reprocessed all the data of the 4 different phylums was that they found an actin homologues in Haliangium ochraceum ¿?¿? (cri cri)
It is surprising because actin is a protein of the cytoskeletal of cells that is found in all eukaryotes and eukaryotes alone, while in the other two domains that cell shaping protein is substituted by MreB. MreB is considered distantly related to actins.
I won't spoil anymore...
Give laud to bioinformatics
References
Wu et al. 2009. A phylogeny-driven genomic encyclopaedia of Bacteria and Archaea. Nature Letters, vol 462, 1056-1060.
Wikipedia
1 comment:
in a distant future... the year 2 thousand....
je je je, in fact, yes, the tittle of the post is a little exaggerated... :P
About the post, i think that the knowledge is like the universe... INFINITE, is like when u learn about the discrete and continuos values... the knowledge is a CONTINUOS data, u can research about a gap between 2 different things (A and B), but then when u have info about the gap, you will have two diferent gaps more (A-gap and gap-B), :S i don't know if I make myself clear je je je... neverthless it's definitely clear that talking about origins of life, domains and phylogeny, are topics full of gaps, that genomic and proteomic are trying to solve.
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