Lifeboat Foundation

In recent years, my lab — or perhaps it’s just me — has developed an obsession with evolutionary transitions. The view that every gene originates from an ancestral state and undergoes impactful changes through its evolutionary journey, whether it’s the gain or loss of an activity or function. The challenge lies in meticulously mapping out these key evolutionary innovations that have significantly influenced function. Addressing this challenge is not merely interesting but absolutely essential in biology. Our aim as biologists transcends understanding how biological systems operate; we seek to unravel how they came to be. And the two questions are more connected than many think.

This post stems from my observation that molecular biologists sometimes appear indifferent to evolution, questioning its relevance to mechanistic research. It baffles me why the centrality of evolution in biology isn’t apparent to some. Maybe they’ve never taken a course on the subject, or perhaps they’ve never fully appreciated the profound concept that every organism and every gene is connected through an unbroken chain of descent to countless ancestors. This perspective holds profound implications for mechanistic molecular biology.

If you already appreciate the link between evolutionary biology and molecular mechanisms, you might find this post to be music to your ears. However, if you’re among those who question the value of evolutionary biology, I encourage you to stay with me; you might discover its significance in ways you hadn’t considered before.

When I started my postdoc in 1998, I think it is safe to say that the Holy Grail (or maybe Rosetta Stone) for many evolutionary biologists was a concept called the Adaptive Landscape. The reason for such exalted status is that the adaptive landscape was then – and remains – the only formal quantitative way to predict and interpret an adaptive radiation of few organisms into many. I was heavily indoctrinated into this framework — as my postdoc was at UBC during precisely the time when Dolph Schluter was writing his now-classic book The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation.

Researchers have developed a new method that uses attosecond core-level spectroscopy to capture molecular dynamics in real time.

The mechanisms behind chemical reactions are complex, involving many dynamic processes that affect both the electrons and the nuclei of the involved atoms. Frequently, the strongly coupled electron and nuclear dynamics trigger radiation-less relaxation processes known as conical intersections. These dynamics underpin many significant biological and chemical functions but are notoriously difficult to detect experimentally.

The challenge in studying these dynamics stems from the difficulty of tracing the nuclear and electronic motion simultaneously. Their dynamics are intertwined and occur on ultrafast timescales, which has made capturing the molecular dynamical evolution in real time a major challenge for both physicists and chemists in recent years.

Can science finally overcome our ultimate biological limitations?

The surge of treatment-resistant microbes is happening in real time in health care settings across the U.S. Knowing how to deal with it is essential.

“Geometry is destiny”

How a simple cell produces remarkably complex behavior, all without a nervous system.

Combining a deep curiosity and “recreational biology,” Stanford researchers have discovered how a simple cell produces remarkably complex behavior, all without a nervous system. It’s origami, they say.

When the going gets tough, many microbes go dormant.

Many microbes and cells are in deep sleep, waiting for the right moment to activate. Biologists discovered a widespread protein that abruptly shuts down a cell’s activity — and turns it back on just as fast.

Strange underwater icicles form in the Earth’s coldest regions and freeze living organisms in place.

Collections of mobile, interacting objects—flocks of birds, colonies of bacterial, or teams of robots—can sometimes behave like solid materials, executing organized rotations or gliding coherently in one direction. But why such systems display one kind of collective organization rather than another has remained unclear. Now researchers have developed a theory that can predict the pattern most likely to emerge under specific conditions [1]. The theory, they hope, may be of use in designing living and artificial materials that can autonomously adapt to their environment.

An “active material” is any system made up of interacting objects able to move under their own power, such as animals, cells, or robots. In so-called active solids, a subset of active materials, strong cohesion between neighboring elements makes the collective act somewhat like a solid. Examples include clusters of certain cell types and networks of robots with rigid connections.

Active solids can display several kinds of collective, organized motion, says Claudio Hernández-López, a PhD student at the École Normale Supérieure and Sorbonne University in France. For example, researchers have observed both coherent rotations and coherent translations in collections of microbes from the phylum Placozoa. Existing theories, however, fail to explain pattern selection—why, if several patterns are possible, does one pattern of behavior emerge rather than another?