Ayyuce Demirbas

“... the origin of our modern word ‘brain’ has a similar derivation for it is believed to come from ‘braegen’, an Old English word (c. 1000) that appears to be related to a yet older French word ‘bran’ meaning refuse.”
― Andrew P. Wickens, A History of the Brain: From Stone Age surgery to modern neuroscience

“According to the classical view, at best one would expect to find copies of complete genes hidden within the ENCODE regions under study. As with the rest of the genome, gene transcripts made up only a fraction of the sequences. Instead, it turned out that not one percent but between 74 and 93 percent of the DNA was copied into RNA. Four out of every five bases had been transcribed into at least one RNA molecule. In other words, an enormous amount of “junk” must have been transcribed.”
― Bernhard Kegel, Epigenetik. Wie Erfahrungen vererbt werden

“It begins with the siRNA binding to a collection of proteins called the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC). The RISC uses the siRNA as a template to search out matching mRNAs in the cell and degrade them. This serves both as a mechanism for regulating gene expression and as a defense against viruses. It also is a powerful tool for biology and medicine. It lets you temporarily “turn off” any gene you want. You can use it to treat a disease, or to study what happens when a gene is disabled. Just identify the mRNA you want to block, select any short segment of it, and create a siRNA molecule with the complementary sequence.”
― Bharath Ramsundar, Deep Learning for the Life Sciences: Applying Deep Learning to Genomics, Microscopy, Drug Discovery, and More

“We know that at least some terrestrial microbes can survive on Mars. What is necessary is a program of artificial selection and genetic engineering of dark plants—perhaps lichens—that could survive the much more severe Martian environment. If such plants could be bred, we might imagine them being seeded on the vast expanse of the Martian polar ice caps, taking root, spreading, blackening the ice caps, absorbing sunlight, heating the ice, and releasing the ancient Martian atmosphere from its long captivity.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos