Sophistication, coordination and communication of cells

Each day we learn more that supports the complexity of life.  Cells communicating, cooperating, working in concert, aware of each other all by chance.  Not a chance.  It smacks of design and programming. 

How cells communicate to move together as a group

Two cell membrane proteins, Fat2 and Lar, trigger leading and trailing edge movements during epithelial migration

A new signaling system has been discovered that epithelial cells use to coordinate their individual movements and efficiently move tissues, report scientists.  

"When an individual cell needs to move somewhere, it manages just fine on its own. It extends protrusions from its leading edge and retracts the trailing edge to scoot itself along, without having to worry about what the other cells around it are doing. But when cells are joined together in a sheet of tissue, or epithelium, they have to coordinate their movements with their neighbors. It's like walking by yourself versus navigating a crowded room. To push through the crowd, you have to communicate with others by talking ("Pardon me") or tapping them on the shoulder. Cells do the same thing, but instead of verbal cues and hand gestures, they use proteins to signal to each other."

Where does the evidence lead?

Nice trailer for Intelligent Design showing just how high the odds are against chance starting life.


Where Does the Evidence Lead was created for classroom, group, and individual study. It is based upon the content of Unlocking the Mystery of Life and examines both Darwinian evolution and the scientific case for intelligent design. Six modules (eight to fourteen minutes in duration) each present a specific facet of the debate over the theories of materialistic evolution and design.
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Book Review: Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

Slowly but surely we are finding life is more complex than we ever thought. From the review: Darwinism and Materialism: They Sink or Swim Together He quotes the information theorist Henry Quastler who stated that “the creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity.”

 "Will Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt be “the most despised science book” of 2013?"

 "Recently the Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt, a book that raises many questions about the theory of evolution. As his title tells us, Darwin himself shared one of these doubts. The book has sold well, reaching #7 on the New York Times bestseller list, #4 on the Los Angeles Times list, and #10 on Publishers Weekly." “Darwin said that speciation occurred too slowly for us to see it. Gould and Eldredge said it occurred too quickly for us to see it. Either way we don’t see it.”

"Organisms are intelligently designed, says Meyer, who has a PhD from Cambridge University in the philosophy of science. His book is an education, demanding attentive reading but no specialized knowledge. To a large extent it uses the facts and arguments of professional biologists, some bordering on open dissent from the orthodoxy."

 So we see more support for IDvolution - God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act.

A new definition of species

I had predicted this a number of times before.  As we study genetics further we will find a better way to classify species.  Alas, here we have a new paper that

Proteins and Genes, Singletons and Species

Recent experimental data from proteomics and genomics are interpreted here in ways that challenge the predominant viewpoint in biology according to which the four evolutionary processes, including mutation, recombination, natural selection and genetic drift, are sufficient to explain the origination of species. The predominant viewpoint appears incompatible with the finding that the sequenced genome of each species contains hundreds, or even thousands, of unique genes – the genes that are not shared with any other species. These unique genes and proteins, singletons, define the very character of every species. Moreover, the distribution of protein families from the sequenced genomes indicates that the complexity of genomes grows in a manner different from that of self-organizing networks: the dominance of singletons leads to the conclusion that in living organisms a most unlikely phenomenon can be the most common one. In order to provide proper rationale for these conclusions related to the singletons, the paper first treats the frequency of functional proteins among random sequences, followed by a discussion on the protein structure space, and it ends by questioning the idea that protein domains represent conserved units of evolution.

Molecular Animation - from genomic information to protein synthesis

A video on the inner workings of the cell.  See the molecular machinery in action.





The movie "The Central Dogma: From Genomic Information to Protein Synthesis" is made by RIKEN Omics Science Center (RIKEN OSC) for the exhibition titled "Beyond DNA" held at National Science Museum of Japan. We tried to illustrate how molecular machines interact each other in the central dogma by giving "Japanese robot-anime" style representation to the molecules. By using this approach, people (especially kids) can easily distinguish between those molecules and understand how they function in our body.