Researchers have discovered a key process by which new genes from non-protein coding DNA undergoes mutations to enable export from the nucleus into the cellular cytoplasm where the new gene can be translated into novel polypeptides. In the new study the researchers have shown that far from being accessories, new gene products are often integral in key phenotype characteristics, such as larger brains in human-specific de novo genes from non-protein coding DNA. But before such genes can become novel protein products, they must change to escape the nuclear localization fated for long non-coding RNA sequences: the study elucidates the mutations involved in enabling nuclear export where the new gene can access the translational machinery of the ribosome, and demonstrates via knock-out and overexpression experiments the functional role of novo genes from non-protein coding DNA in organism development, like the enlargement of the cerebral cortex in humans.  

By: William Brown,...

By: William Brown, Biophysicist at the Resonance Science Foundation

Compared to humans the Octopus is in many ways alien, it is an invertebrate with the only hard part being a chitinous beak, it has eight arms where most of its neuronal tissue—or brain—is located, and in many species, it can shape-shift and change the color of its integument to match its surrounding with near perfect adaptive camouflage. However, despite the many differences, many octopus species do share one similarity with that of humans: sophisticated cognitive capabilities, including problem solving, fore-thought, and creative ingenuity.

Since Octopus species have a rather large evolutionary distance from humans, mammals, or even vertebrates, a study of the cellular and molecular underpinning of their sophisticated cognitive capabilities can give us insight into what specific mechanisms enable and drive intelligence in animals. Interestingly, the molecular underpinnings of neuronal plasticity...

By: William Brown, Biophysicist at the Resonance Science Foundation

In our study The Unified Spacememory Network: from cosmogenesis to consciousness, we described how quantum information processing pathways in the molecular genetic system of the biological organism order permutations in a non-random fashion that result in natural directional adaptation and evolution. Information exchanges involving quantum mechanisms at the molecular level of the biological system with the environment and the entanglement nexus of the Spacememory morphogenic field give a kind of natural intelligence to the evolvability of organisms, allowing for meaningful adaptations to occur at an accelerated rate beyond what would be possible under purely random genetic mutations. As the evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner states, “natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them… nature’s many innovations, some uncannily perfect, call for natural principles that...

By: William Brown, Biophysicist at the Resonance Science Foundation

A study published in the journal Science has described the generation of a genetic transcription factor by fusion of a pre-existing gene with the transposase exon of a mobile genetic element [1]. Mobile, or transposable genetic elements cut-and-paste or copy-and-paste their genetic sequence into various sites throughout a genome using a transposase enzyme that they code for. In a survey of all tetrapod (vertebrate animals) genomes available the study identified 106 host-transposase fusion events, in which during transposition, transposase sequences were inserted into a pre-existing gene, resulting in alternative splicing of the gene generating novel functional proteins— many of which are involved in transcriptional regulation. Since transcriptional regulators interact simultaneously with large numbers of genes, up-regulating or down-regulating their expression in the gene network, such events can result in...