To study this “interactome,” researchers collecting data on 9 million protein interactions among species:
The scientists studied 1,840 species – from bacteria to primates – to understand how evolution built life forms that could survive in the face of natural adversities. What they discovered was profound yet intuitive: Every species has evolved backup plans that allow its protein machinery to find bypasses and workarounds when nature tries to gum up the works. No previous study has ever surveyed such a broad swath of species to find a survival strategy common to all life: Develop a versatile and robust molecular machinery.
“Across our entire sample, we find that the resilience of a species is strongly correlated with having protein networks that are robust to failure and can interact in multiple ways to preserve life,” said Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec, senior author of the paper that appears today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Evolutionary biologist Marcus Feldman, a co-author on the paper, said this is the most ambitious effort yet to understand what scientists call the interactome – the sum total of all the protein interactions for each species, just as genome describes the sum total of a species’ DNA. “We’re looking at the mechanism of evolution on an unprecedented scale, using the tools of data science to study the structure of the protein networks that make life possible,” Feldman said. Tom Abate, “Species evolve ways to back up life’s machinery” at Phys.org
And it all just happened, due to natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism), right? Look around you and you will see rocks slowly evolving into horses, using the same randomness…
Before you go: “Interspecies communication” strategy between gut bacteria and mammalian hosts’ genes described
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