Evolutionary advantage

Robert Richards Well, but probably not evolutionary derived. You may have to look at the whole population to see whether it s a trait that it is. Talk about maternal attachment. That s a ubiquitous phenomenon. It has certain essential features, and the evolutionary advantage seems pretty straightforward. 

Fig. 10.8 The importance of the vesicle for the Darwinian evolution of a replicase. Compart-mentalisation ensures that related molecules tend to stay together. This permits superior mutant replicases (grey) to replicate more effectively than the parent (black) replicases. The evolutionary advantage spreads in the form of vesicles with superior replicase molecules, leading with a greater probability to vesicles with at least two replicase molecules (or a replicase and a matrix molecule). Vesicles with less than two replicase molecules are struck out their progeny cannot continue the RNA self-replication. Thus, the vesicles with better replicases form the growing fraction of vesicles which carry forward the replicase activity (Szostak et al., 2001)...

Countless generations of grazing by wild and domesticated animals resulted in the survival and reproduction of the specialized qualities of grasses, especially turfgrasses. The evolutionary advantages of grasses, most clearly developed in... 

The reason that the cyclodextrin transglycosylase occurs only in Bacillus macerans and a few other thermophilic bacteria has not, as yet, been determined. Nevertheless, it is interesting to speculate about the possible evolutionary advantage that a bacterium might have by possessing the cyclodextrin transglycosylase. Because the cyclodextrins have no end... 

Microorganisms are extremely versatile chemists. The wide variety of structures among the relatively few compounds discussed here is testimony to that. There are several theories to explain the evolutionary advantage conferred by the synthesis of secondary metabolites. (It often seems that they serve primarily to enrich pharmaceutical companies.) Until recently, the idea that they conferred a competitive advantage upon the producing organism seemed reasonable, since most of the products that had been detected had antibiotic activity. 

In recent years, developments in high-throughput screening inspired many pharmaceutical companies to focus and rely on combinatorial chemistry, especially massive parallel synthesis, to find new lead structures. The employed chemistry is often simple and the concept depends on sheer numbers for success. The main research areas were heterocyclic and peptide chemistry, and the resulting structures often lacked complexity and diversity, and most importantly the chance to utilize the evolutionary advantage of natural products with their privileged structures. 

It is postulated that there is an evolutionary advantage to carrying the CF gene since it may afford some protection against cholera. As water secretion is increased when CTX switches on the adenyl cyclase, in turn activating the CFTR channel, it is reasoned that a defective CFTR channel (in CF) would protect individuals against death by dehydration. 

The manifest evolutionary advantages of /3-D-ribose over other potential nucleic acid sugar building blocks have been related to its unique stereochemical features in a review <2006MI189>. 

Wink, M. (2008b) Evolutionary advantage and molecular modes of action of multi-component mixtures used in phytomedicine. Curr. Drug Metab., 9, 996-1009. 

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