Snippets (biology)

Things to use or delete. See Snippets.

Cap snatching

The first step of transcription for some RNA viruses is cap snatching, in which the first 10-20 residues of a host cell RNA is removed (snatched) and used as the 5' cap of the nascent viral RNA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap_snatching

Firebrat

The firebrat (Thermobia domestica, sometimes listed as Thermophila furnorum) is a small hexapod (typically 1–1.5 cm) similar to the silverfish, both in the order Zygentoma.

Firebrats prefer higher temperatures and require some humidity, and can be found in bakeries and near boilers or furnaces. They feed on a wide variety of carbohydrates and starches that are also protein sources such as dog food, flour and book bindings. They are distributed throughout most parts of the world and are normally found outdoors under rocks, leaf litter, and in similar environments, but are also often found indoors where they are considered pests. They do not cause major damage, but they can contaminate food, damage paper goods, and stain clothing. Otherwise they are mostly harmless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebrat

Poky the mutant mold

Extranuclear inheritance (also known as cytoplasmic inheritance) is a form of non-Mendelian inheritance first discovered by Carl Correns in 1908. While working with Mirabilis jalapa Correns observed that leaf color was dependent only on the genotype of the maternal parent. Based on these data, he determined that the trait was transmitted through a character present in the cytoplasm of the ovule. Later research by Ruth Sager and others identified DNA present in chloroplasts as being responsible for the unusual inheritance pattern observed. Work on the poky strain of the mold Neurospora crassa begun by Mary and Hershel Mitchell ultimately led to the discovery of genetic material in mitochondria as well.

According to the endosymbiont theory, mitochondria and chloroplasts were once free living organisms that were each taken up by a eukaryotic cell. Over time, mitochondria and chloroplasts formed a symbiotic relationship with their eukaryotic hosts. Although the transfer of a number of genes from these organelles to the nucleus prevents them from living independently, each still possesses genetic material in the form of double stranded DNA.

It is the transmission of this organellar DNA that is responsible for the phenomenon of extranuclear inheritance. Both chloroplasts and mitochondria are present in the cytoplasm of maternal gametes only. Paternal gametes (sperm for example) do not have cytoplasmic mitochondria. Thus, the phenotype of traits linked to genes found in either chloroplasts or mitochondria are determined exclusively by the maternal parent.

In humans, mitochondrial diseases are a class of diseases, many of which affect the muscles and the eye.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Mendelian_inheritance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extranuclear_inheritance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparental_inheritance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurospora_crassa

Eructiform

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eructation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruciform

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eruciform

The Giant Crepuscular Skipper

Gretna balenge, the giant crepuscular skipper, is a butterfly in the family Hesperiidae. It is found in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. The habitat consists of all areas where suitable palms grow.

Adults are attracted to various kinds of foul substances.

The larvae feed on Raphia farinifera and Eremospatha species.

Mautam and Rat Flood

Mautam (Mizo for "bamboo death") is a cyclic ecological phenomenon that occurs every 48 - 50 years in the northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, which are 30% covered by wild bamboo forests, as well as Chin State in Myanmar, particularly Hakha, Thantlang, Falam, Paletwa, and Matupi Townships. its stages involves a rat boom, which is in turn creates a widespread famine in those areas.

During mautam, Melocanna baccifera, a species of bamboo, flowers at one time across a wide area. This event is followed invariably by a plague of black rats in what is called a rat flood. This occurs as the rats multiply in response to the temporary windfall of seeds, and leave the forests to forage on stored grain when the bamboo seeds are exhausted, which in turn causes devastating famine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam

Loxa

Loxa is an insect genus in the large family of shield bugs. It occurs primarily in Central America and Mexico, but is also found in Texas, Florida and South America. While Loxa is a genus of the tribe Pentatomini, its species are similar in many respects to those in the Chlorocorini, specifically the genera: Chlorocoris Spinola, Chloropepla Stål, Mayrinia Horvath and Fecelia Stål. Some species of Loxa are minor crop pests, for example Loxa deducta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loxa

See also:

• Loxa Luck.

Earless seals have retractable nipples

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earless_seal

International Knockout Mouse Consortium

• International Knockout Mouse Consortium

Cephalagogue

Obstetrical forceps (obsolete?).

https://www.google.com/search?q=cephalagogue

The computation power of living systems is maintained by decoherence-free internal quantum states

Conference paper (2005) by Abir Igamberdiev.

Abstract:

The internal quantum state (IQS) is a kind of a pilot-wave (in the Bohmian sense) attached to a macroscopic system and representing its potential field continuously reduced during its exhibition to the external world. This state is maintained as decoherence-free by applying error-correction commands to it and by screening from thermal interactions. Its effective temperature is kept down below the millikelvin range thus being screened even from the background microwave radiation. The quantum Zeno effect enables coherent superpositions and entanglement to persist for macroscopic time intervals. The IQS thus avoids the Boltzmann statistics and approaches a state when the Bose-Einstein statistics is applicable. The IQS of a living system can be viewed as a subtle individual subatomic structure reduced to a complex pattern of vibrating strings and exhibiting itself via a visible classical body-like system. Light quanta inside IQS are trapped like matter is trapped by a black hole in space. The IQS can be considered as a unified field meeting place of gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces. The phenomenon of emission of weak coherent light is an indirect evidence of coherent long-living internal quantum states in living systems. This emission is a kind of a similar phenomenon as the Hawking's radiation from black holes and it may serve for unification of the processes taking place in different subsystems of a biological system (synchronization of individual coherent states within the whole system). The external exhibition of the IQS can be expressed as a mapping from complex to real numbers where the certain rules are generated, e.g. the power law and other recursive formulae. In the simplest case when two superposed states are reduced, it has a limit of price of action equal to the Planck's constant. The reduction is non-computable and resembles the act of volition. The result is Gödel number appearing above superposed states and memorizing the act of reduction. It is used by living system as an information unit in emerging computation process.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228523852_The_computation_power_of_living_systems_is_maintained_by_decoherence-free_internal_quantum_states

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abir_Igamberdiev

The Most Basal Whale

Pakicetus is an extinct genus of amphibious cetacean of the family Pakicetidae, which was endemic to Pakistan during the Eocene.[1] The vast majority of paleontologists regard it as the most basal whale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakicetus

Elysia chlorotica

Elysia chlorotica (common name the eastern emerald elysia) is a small-to-medium-sized species of green sea slug, a marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusc. This sea slug superficially resembles a nudibranch, yet it does not belong to that clade of gastropods. Instead it is a member of the clade Sacoglossa, the sap-sucking sea slugs. Some members of this group use chloroplasts from the algae they eat, a phenomenon known as kleptoplasty. Elysia chlorotica is one of the "solar-powered sea slugs", utilizing solar energy via chloroplasts from its algal food. It lives in a subcellular endosymbiotic relationship with chloroplasts of the marine heterokont alga Vaucheria litorea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysia_chlorotica

Radioactive gold jewelry

At some time during the 1930s and 1940s, gold brachytherapy seeds that previously contained radon-222 were melted down by an unknown individual or individuals. Presumably this occurred somewhere in upstate New York. The gold, contaminated with the long-lived decay products of radon (Pb-210, Bi-210 and Po-210), was then mixed with uncontaminated gold and used to manufacture jewelry. Over the years, the wearing of this jewelry, the rings in particular, resulted in mild to severe skin damage. In the 1960s, dermatologists recognized that the damage seemed to be related to the jewelry and had the latter analyzed by health officials who determined that the jewelry was indeed radioactive. Although the issue was addressed in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1967 (JAMA 205(8):595-596), it seems that the matter of radioactive gold jewelry wasn't taken seriously until the 1980s.

https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/hpposters/goldjewelry.htm

Spondylus

Spondylus is a genus of bivalve molluscs, the only genus in the family Spondylidae. They are known in English as spiny oysters (though they are not, in fact, oysters).

They look cool: spiked bivalves.

Stichaster striatus

Stichaster striatus, the common light striated star, is a species of starfish in the family Stichasteridae, found in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. It was first described by the German zoologists Johannes Peter Müller and Franz Hermann Troschel in 1840.

It has been found that an aqueous extract of S. striatus, when fed to rats with a genetic disposition to consume alcohol to excess, reduced their voluntary intake of alcohol.[4] This line of research was inspired by an oral tradition that Jesuit property-owners in South America in the 17th and 18th century fed "starfish soup" to their workers to encourage sobriety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichaster_striatus

Rectal thermometer blues

"Once had a father abscond from the ER with his feverish toddler because he wasn’t gonna let us “turn him faggot” by taking a rectal temperature."

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/nra-president-ollie-north-partially-blames-school-shootings-on-ritalin/121440/16

Birth Canal

It is not polite to shout “birth canal!” in a crowded delivery room.

Myxococcus xanthus

Myxococcus xanthus is a gram-negative, rod-shaped species of myxobacteria that exhibits various forms of self-organizing behavior as a response to environmental cues. Under normal conditions with abundant food, it exists as a predatory, saprophytic single-species biofilm called a swarm. Under starvation conditions, it undergoes a multicellular development cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxococcus_xanthus

Palaeocastor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeocastor

Bacteriophage iron spike

[R]esearchers modified the phage's spike genes so that they only produced the portion of the protein tip that was resistant to being viewed. When they crystallized this smaller protein fragment, the x-rays were finally able to resolve its structure, and from this the team had the very first picture of the tip of the spike: a single iron atom held in place by six amino acids, forming a sharp needlelike tip—perfectly suited for piercing the outer membranes of bacteria. The team reports its findings this month in Structure.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/02/bacteria-killing-viruses-wield-iron-spike