Natural evolution

Crameri, A., Raillard, S.-A., Bermudez, E., Stemmer, W.P.C. DNA shuffling of a family of genes from diverse species accelerates directed evolution. Nature 391 288-291, 1998. 

Greeley J, Jaramillo T, Bonde J, Chorkendorff I, N0rskov JK. 2006a. Combinatorial high-throughput screening of electrocatalytic materials for hydrogen evolution. Nature Mater 5 909 913. 

Over the years of evolution, Nature has developed enzymes which are able to catalyze a multitude of different transformations with amazing enhancements in rate [1]. Moreover, these enzyme proteins show a high specificity in most cases, allowing the enantioselective formation of chiral compounds. Therefore, it is not surprising that they have been used for decades as biocatalysts in the chemical synthesis in a flask. Besides their synthetic advantages, enzymes are also beneficial from an economical - and especially ecological - point of view, as they stand for renewable resources and biocompatible reaction conditions in most cases, which corresponds with the conception of Green Chemistry [2]. 

Tawfik, D.S. and Griffiths, A.D. (1998) Man-made cell-like compartments for molecular evolution. Nature... 

Fox, R.J., Davis, S.C., Mundorff, E.C. et al. (2007) Improving catalytic function by ProSAR-driven enzyme evolution. Nature Biotechnology, 25, 338-344. 

Greer, J. M., Puetz, J., Thomas, K. R. and Capecchi, M. R. (2000), Maintenance of functional equivalence during paralogous Hox gene evolution , Nature (London), 403, 661 -665. 

Hacker J, Kaper JB. Pathogenicity islands and the evolution of microbes. Annu Rev Microbiol 2000 54 641-679. Wren BW. Microbial genome analysis insights into virulence, host adaptation and evolution. Nature Rev Genet 2000 l[l] 30-39. 

Albarede, F. (1985). Open magma chambers regime and trace element evolution. Nature, 318, 356-58. 

Rat Genome Sequencing Project Gonsortium. 2004. Genome sequence of the Brown Norway rat yields insights into mammalian evolution. Nature 428 493. 

Hall DO, Cammack R, Rao KK. 1971. A role for ferredoxins in the origin of life and biological evolution. Nature 233 136-8. 

Ming T, Anders E, Hoppe P, Zinner E (1989) Meteoritic silicon carbide and its stellar sources, implications for galactic chemical evolution. Nature 339 351-354 Minigawa M, Wada E (1984) Stepwise enrichments of along food chains further evidence and the relation between 5 N and animal age. Geochim Cosmochim Acta 48 1135-1140 Mizutani Y, Rafter TA (1973) Isotopic behavior of sulfate oxygen in the bacterial reduction of sulfate. Geochem J 6 183-191... 

In contrast, through eons of evolution Nature has come up with many biopolymers that can combine important mechanical properties including strength, toughness, and elasticity. For example, sUks (Oroudjev et al. 2002), cell adhesion proteins (Law et al. 2003), and connective proteins existing in both soft and hard tissues such as muscle (Kellermayer et al. 1997 Rief, Gautel, et al. 1997 Marszalek et al. 1999 Li et al. 2000), seasheUs (Smith et al. 1999), and bone (Thompson et al. 2001)... 

The desire to create RNA molecules with predefined properties and to optimize their efficiencies and specificities has led to a new technique called evolutionary biotechnology or applied molecular evolution. Natural selection or its analogue in test-tube evolution optimizes fitness or replication rate constants, respectively. High replication rates, however, are neither required nor wanted in the search for... 

Prell WL, Kutzbach JE (1992) Sensitivity of the Indian monsoon to forcing parameters and implications for its evolution. Nature 360 647-652... 

Techniques that allow researchers to evolve specific enzyme properties in the laboratory circumvent some of the obstacles we encounter when we study only the products of natural evolution. Natural evolution is limited by both the rate at which mutations occur and the rate at which they become fixed in the population, with the consequence that new properties can take many years to appear. Laboratory evolution (or directed evolution ) can focus on single proteins, and the time scale... 

Arnold, F. H. (1998b). When blind is better protein design by evolution. Nature... 

Donachie WD, Blakely GW (2003) Coupling the initiation of chromosome replication to cell size in Escherichia coli. Curr Opin Microbiol 6 146-150 Doolittle WF, Sapienza C (1980) Selfish genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evolution. Nature 284 601-603... 

Graham, J.B., R. Dudley, N. Aguilar, and C. Gans (1995). Implications of the late Paleozoic oxygen pulse for physiology and evolution. Nature 375 117-120. 

Y. Yamagata, H. Watanabe, M. Saitoh and T. Namba (1991). Volcanic production of polyphosphates and its relevance to prebiotic evolution. Nature (London), 352, 516-519. 

The physical separation between genotype and phenotype has an extraordinary consequence, because mental genotypes can be directly instructed by mental phenotypes, and this means that cultural heredity is based on a transmission of acquired characters. Cultural inheritance, in other words, is transmitted with a Lamarckian mechanism, whereas biological inheritance relies on a Mendelian mechanism which is enormously slower. As a result, cultural evolution is much faster than biological evolution, and almost all differences between biology and culture can be traced back to the divide that exists in their hereditary mechanisms. The discovery that human artifacts (i.e. cultural phenotypes) obey the Lotka-Volterra equations has two outstanding consequences. The first is that selection accounts for all types of adaptive evolution natural selection is the mechanism hy which all phenotypes - biological as well as cultural - diffuse in the world. 

Dover, G. 1982. Molecular drive a cohesive mode of species evolution. Nature, 299,111-117. 

In the mimicking of an enzymatic process there is no need to copy the structure of protein and coenzyme groups and all stages of this process. In the course of evolution, Nature created enzymes in specific conditions in certain media and utilized certain building materials . Besides chemical functions, enzymes bear many other obligations, serving as units of complicated enzymatic and membrane ensembles. These conditions have not always been the most favorable for catalytic properties and the stability of enzymes. 

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