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Telomeres in Evolution and Development from Biosemiotic Perspective

Guenther Witzany¹

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1. telos-Philosophische Praxis

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Document Type:

Poster

Date:

Received 11 November 2007 17:47 UTC; Posted 12 November 2007

Subjects:

Genetics & Genomics, Evolutionary Biology

Tags:

• biosemiotics
• telomeres
• Evolution

Abstract:

Whereas telomeres protect terminal ends of linear chromosomes, telomerases identify natural chromosome ends being different from broken DNA. Although telomeres play a crucial role in the linear chromosome organisation of eukaryotic cells, their molecular syntax descended from an ancient retroviral competence. This is an indicator for the early retroviral colonization of large double stranded DNA viruses, which are putative ancestors of the eukaryotic nucleus.

This contribution will demonstrate an advantage of the biosemiotic approach towards our evolutionary understanding of telomeres: focus on the genetic/genomic structures as language-like text which follows combinatorial (syntactic), context-sensitive (pragmatic) and content-specific (semantic) semiotic rules. Genetic/genomic organisation from the biosemiotic perspective is not seen any longer as an object of randomly derived alterations (mutations) but as functional innovation coherent with the broad variety of natural genome editing competences of viruses.

Presented at:

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meeting “Telomeres & Telomerases” , 04 May 2007

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License:

This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

How to cite this document:

Witzany, Guenther. Telomeres in Evolution and Development from Biosemiotic Perspective. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2007.932.2> (2007)

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Other versions of this document in Nature Precedings

Version number	Document title	Date
v1	Posted 06 September 2007

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