Eclectic Perambulations in the Noosphere
Sphagnum palustre blankets the forest floor on Hawaii's Kohala Mountain.
Photograph courtesy Sara C. Hotchkiss
"A moss spreading throughout the Hawaiian Islands appears to be an ancient clone that has copied itself for some 50,000 years—and may be one of the oldest multicellular organisms on Earth..."
Image: Joseph R. Ecker, Salk Institute of Biological Studies. Plant Photo: Joe Belcovson, Salk Institute for Biological studies. Network Map: Mary Galli, Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Matija Dreze, Center for Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute.
"The image shows an Arabidopsis plant overlaid on a network map of protein-protein interactions. The clusters of colors represent "communities" of interacting proteins that are enriched in specific plant processes.
Scientists have created the largest map of protein-to-protein interactions of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana:
"For this project, over 10,000 'open reading frame' clones were converted and sequence verified in preparation for protein-interaction screening," says Galli.
Vidal, Braun, Hill and their colleagues systematically ran these open reading frames through a high quality protein-interaction screening process, based on a test known as the yeast two-hybrid screen. Out of more than forty million possible pair combinations, they found a total of 6,205 Arabidopsis protein- protein interactions, involving 2,774 individual proteins. The researchers confirmed the high quality of these data, for example by showing their overlap with protein interaction datafrom past studies.
The new map of 6,205 protein partnerings represents only about two percent of the full protein- protein "interactome" for Arabidopsis, since the screening test covered only a third of all Arabidopsis proteins, and wasn't sensitive enough to detect many weaker protein interactions. "There will be larger maps after this one," says Ecker."
see also Largest-Ever Map of Plant Protein Interactions
(Image: Thomas White/DESY)
Meet photosystem I, a plant protein that converts sunlight into energy during photosynthesis, in all its crystalline glory.
"...the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second,” they write.
Our total storage capacity is the same as an adult human’s DNA. And there are several billion humans on the planet."
Atom-probe tomography (APT) of "the black teeth of an Eastern beaded chiton, a sea mollusk, are used for scraping algae from rocks. They are capped with one of the hardest biominerals known, a nanocomposite of magnetite and chitin-based fibers. (Credit: Image courtesy of Northwestern University) "
"Teeth and bone are important and complex structures in humans and other animals, but little is actually known about their chemical structure at the atomic scale. What exactly gives them their renowned toughness, hardness and strength? How do organisms control the synthesis of these advanced functional composites?"
"Bioluminescence is a from of natural light created by living organisms converting internal chemical energy into light. "
