Professor Suegene Noh\u2019s lecture on \u201cHow Current Genomes are Shaped by Evolutionary Past\u201d explored how the lives of microorganisms are impacted by their social interactions both of the same and differing species. These interactions often result in the evolution of cells and genes. Professor Suegene Noh focused primarily on the social amoeba and its microbial symbiont as an example for this lecture.<\/p>\n
Personally, beyond my single course in Microorganisms and Society, this talk presented a lot of information that I was not very familiar with. It was heavily technical and included a lot of jargon which made it difficult for me to truly understand the concept. But Professor Suegene Noh did a great job of breaking some concepts down. She started the lecture off with this idea of the Central Dogma. The Central Dogma of molecular biology describes the two-step process, transcription and translation, by which the information in genes flows into proteins. DNA first goes through transcription. Transcription is the synthesis of an RNA copy of a segment of DNA. After that, the DNA is converted into RNA which is then translated into a protein. The Central Dogma provides the basic framework for how genetic information flows from a DNA sequence to a protein production inside cells. Using this framework, Professor Suegene Noh was able to use next-generation sequencing to read millions of DNA sequences on specialized instruments to analyze her dicty strains. During her experiment she found that competitive interactions among amoebas have caused certain genes to evolve more rapidly and how associating with an amoeba host may have caused symbiont genomes to shrink in size.<\/p>\n
Relating this concept of conflict and evolution back to the theme of this series: Presence of the Past, we can see how this manifest on a much larger scale. Throughout time, humans have gone through countless conflicts and have thus evolved from it. Examples of this include the evolution of sciences. Before when we were plagued with diseases and sickness, there were no remedies, but we as a society evolved and created things like modern medicine and vaccines. Conflict forces life to either adapt and grow or to fall back and die. But our society today, wouldn\u2019t be where it is if it was not for people using conflict and competition and creating something new and start changing. Biologically see can easily see how our cells and DNA have changed from the prehistoric times but looking more sociologically and historically we can see how our civilization has been built on social conflict and how we have evolved because of it.<\/p>\n
During the questions and answers portion of the discussion, someone in the audience as a question about why Professor Noh used dicty from the wild as opposed from dicty grown in a lab. Her response was that there are only three lab strains and because of that, the work from that would not be applicable to that of the real world. She also wanted to find a natural response and natural variation. I enjoyed her response because we can easily translate this to a social scale and explore how facilitated conflict as opposed to natural conflict breed different results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Professor Suegene Noh\u2019s lecture on \u201cHow Current Genomes are Shaped by Evolutionary Past\u201d explored how the lives of microorganisms are impacted by their social interactions both of the same and differing species. These interactions often result in the evolution of cells and genes. Professor Suegene Noh focused primarily on the social amoeba and its microbial … <\/p>\n