Victrix Computational Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry Consultancy
Contact us
  • Home
  • Philosophy
  • Services
  • Our Clients
  • Contact
  • About
    • Press Releases
  • Victrix Sounds Off
  • Blog

Fossils, Both Genetic and Linguistic

5/8/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
This post is slightly off the beaten path for a drug discovery consultancy, but these two articles were just too juicy to pass up. One paper in PNAS claims to have identified “ultra-conserved words” in a study of Eurasian languages.  It used a statistical analysis to propose a superfamily to all Eurasian languages that evolved ~15,000 YBP. The implications to this are that if you met a hunter-gatherer from that time, you would be able to speak the sentences: “You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!” and they would at least have some idea of what you were saying. I know the “lumpers” in the historical linguistic camp have a bad rap because of Joseph Greenberg’s disciple Merritt Ruhlen’s claim the proto-human word for the number one was ‘dik’. I actually sort of buy into the hypothesis.  I have to admit one of my hobbies is reconstructing Proto-Indo-European roots, so I am biased.

The second article in Nature, does a convincing job in showing through evolutionary bioinformatics (something I again admit to practicing as a hobby, in the spirit of full disclosure) that the hepatitis B virus entered eukaryotes ~83 million years ago.  The oldest viral relic in a genome is the 99% conserved sequence for avian Hep-B in Zebra Finches.  Chickens don’t have a relic of Hep-B.  Since their oldest common ancestor lived ~82 million years ago, the virus must have entered the genome before that time. Bob’s your uncle!

Read both papers.  They are entertaining as well as quite possibly true.


0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Adam Kallel Ph. D.

    Our CSO sounds off about drug discovery, computational chemistry and history

    Archives

    March 2014
    January 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013

    Categories

    All
    Ageing
    Amphetamine
    Anti-virals
    Biography
    Broken Society
    Caffeine
    Cancer
    Cd26
    Cluster Headache
    Colic
    Collaboration
    Corona Virus
    Danger Danger
    Depression
    Drug Discovery
    Drug Resistence
    Economy Of Scale
    Electron Microscopy
    Emergent Infectious Disease
    Encephalitis Lethargica
    Global Epidemiology
    Goal Setting
    HCoV-EMC
    Hiring
    Incorrect Pathologizing
    Incretin
    Influenza
    Jobs
    Me
    Merck
    Mergers
    Metabolic Disease
    Migraine
    Nerd
    Neurotransmiters
    Open Positions
    Over Prescription
    Overwork
    Pharma
    Pharmaceutical Industry
    Restructuring
    Stimulants
    Telomerase
    Tuberculosis
    Viral Replication
    Virus

    RSS Feed

    comments powered by Disqus
    View my profile on LinkedIn