Related papers: Steroid Receptors and Vertebrate Evolution
Genome sizes have evolved to vary widely, from 250 bases in viroids to 670 billion bases in amoeba. This remarkable variation in genome size is the outcome of complex interactions between various evolutionary factors such as point mutation…
This paper develops a point-mutation model describing the evolutionary dynamics of a population of adult stem cells. Such a model may prove useful for quantitative studies of tissue aging and the emergence of cancer. We consider two modes…
The last few million years on planet Earth have witnessed two remarkable phases of hominid development, starting with a phase of biological evolution characterised by rather rapid increase of the size of the brain. This has been followed by…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
The collisions of two simultaneously generated impulses in the giant axons of both earthworms and lobster propagating in orthodromic and antidromic direction were investigated. The experiments have been performed on the extracted ventral…
The current theory of evolution is almost the one Darwin and Wallace proposed two centuries ago and the following discoveries e.g., Mendelian genetics and neutral mutation theory have not made significant modifications. The current…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
Stress-induced glucocorticoid elevation is a highly conserved response among vertebrates. This facilitates stress adaptation and the mode of action involves activation of the intracellular glucocorticoid receptor leading to the modulation…
Among the best-known facts of the brain are the contralateral visual, auditory, sensational, and motor mappings in the forebrain. How and why did these evolve? The few theories to this question provide functional answers, such as better…
Studies by microbiologists from the 1970s provided robust estimates for the energy supply and demand of a prokaryotic cell. The amount of ATP needed to support growth was calculated from the chemical composition of the cell and known…
Developmental constraints have been postulated to limit the space of feasible phenotypes and thus shape animal evolution. These constraints have been suggested to be the strongest during either early or mid-embryogenesis, which corresponds…
Horseshoe crabs are marine arthropods with a fossil record extending back approximately 450 million years. They exhibit remarkable morphological stability over their long evolutionary history, retaining a number of ancestral arthropod…
In human cells, estrogenic signals induce cyclical association and dissociation of specific proteins with the DNA in order to activate transcription of estrogen-responsive genes. These oscillations can be modeled by assuming a large number…
The evolution of spiking neurons and nervous systems in the late Ediacaran period simultaneously with the evolution of carnivores around 550 million years ago can be explained by the need for accurately timed decisions under an imminent…
Previous studies of the flexibilities of ancestral proteins suggests that proteins evolve their function by altering their native state ensemble. Here we propose a more direct method of visualizing this by measuring the changes in the…
Studies of the evolution of massive protostars and the evolution of their host molecular cloud cores are commonly treated as separate problems. However, interdependencies between the two can be significant. Here, we study the simultaneous…
Since the Hadean era of Earth's history, peptides/proteins and RNA have undergone a complex evolutionary trajectory. Originating from simple monomeric units, these molecules evolved abiotically under various biochemical and biophysical…
The estrogen receptor is a nuclear hormone receptor activated by the natural steroid hormone 17$\beta$-estradiol (E2). Fragment molecular orbital (FMO) calculations were performed which allowed us to obtain the interaction energy…
Cells often have tens of thousands of receptors, even though only a few activated receptors can trigger full cellular responses. Reasons for the overabundance of receptors remain unclear. We suggest that, in certain conditions, the large…
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…