Scientists are making predictions about the biological make-up of advanced, complex aliens, offering a degree of insight as to what they might look like. In Ridley Scott’s movie Prometheus stunning opening, the Engineer, the blue muscle-bound alien, mirrors a modern human, standing by the waterfall drinking black goo to break down his genetic structure and spread life on Earth through his DNA. What we see is the beginning is the creation of Earth. The giant ship has landed on early Earth to drop off the Engineer to terraform the planet and make it sustainable for life.
“It’s the heart of darkness of the genome, we warn students not to go there,” said Charles Langley, professor of evolution and ecology at University of California, Davis. Geneticists exploring the dark heart of the human genome have discovered big chunks of Neanderthal and other ancient DNA. The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.
Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology by researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, who reported on Wednesday that they had rewritten the DNA of the bacteria Escherichia coli, producing a synthetic genome four times larger and far more complex than any previously created. (more…)
As more and more giant viruses have been discovered, scientists have started to wonder whether some genes in living organisms actually came from ancient viruses. “Viruses are not traditionally considered alive,” writes Sarah Zang in The Atlantic, “because they lack the cellular machinery to replicate on their own. But scientists have found giant viruses with genes for building proteins, which are necessary for replication.
“We have other species that are even longer lived than humans,” says researcher Andrei Seluanov at the University of Rochester. Next steps involve analyzing whether species that have longer lifespans than humans—like the bowhead whale, which can live more than 200 years—have evolved even more robust SIRT6 genes.
A third extinct “ghost species” beyond Neanderthals and Denisovans that interbred with anatomically modern humans has been unveiled by researchers from Spain and Estonia using artificial intelligence. This third extinct species is likely a hybrid or close relative of Neanderthals and Denisovans that crossbred with “Out of Africa” modern humans in Asia.