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Published online 28 May 2008 | Nature 453, 583-585 (2008) | doi:10.1038/453583a
News Feature
Marine microbiology: Origins of Death
Programmed cell death is usually seen as the unique prerogative of plants and animals. So how is it that photosynthetic plankton have been killing themselves by uncannily similar methods for billions of years? Nick Lane investigates.
One evening 20 years ago, Paul Falkowski left the lab so tired that he omitted to refresh the solution in his culture flasks of Emiliania huxleyi, one of the world's most widespread coccolithophores. The following morning he was shocked to find the flasks full of clear solution, the merest sediment lining the bottom, all that remained of the plankton.
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it means every genome have its own time to servive ! Programme cell death doesn not corelates with the genome of speciecs . it means every genome has its own life period ?
Organismal Death Is Intrinsic and Has a Deeper Root!!!!!------------ I strongly believe that immortal organisms do not exist because every organism (large or small; prokaryotic or eukaryotic, unicellular or multicellular) ages (http://im1.biz/Aging.htm). Aging is not anything unique to life and certainly happened to lives that evolved before multicellular lives (http://im1.biz/Evolution.htm).//// Programmed Cell Death (PCD) or apoptosis is one way that organisms got killed. But, without it, many organisms will still die in some other NATURAL ways due to the INTRINSIC aging process which is nothing but NORMAL to every organism.//// Based on a unique understanding of cell life (http://im1.biz/CellRejection.htm) I showed the first time in the world that bacteria live longer than a "cell cycle" but should have finite life span (http://im1.biz/Liu_Discovery_English.htm). I also pointed out quite earlier that stem cells are not immortal (http://im1.biz/StemCell.htm).//// A real knowledge on cell life also enabled me to find out the pseudoscientific nature of some claims made for iPS cells such as "turning clock back" and "reprogramming adult cells into embryonic cells" (http://im1.biz/Cloning.htm).//// Thus, while people still puzzled over some unconventional observations, it may be better to learn some insightful knowledge that have been intentionally ignored by the "mainstream".//// It is time to investigate many of our "conventions" to see if they are truly scientific! ----------- Shi V. Liu (SVL@logibio.com; http://im1.biz; http://blog.sina.com.cn/im1)
To add two aspects of further perspectives: (i) Autolysis in yeasts has a sparkling history indeed, both in the lab and in the making of Champagne. (ii) The spontaneous induction of lysogenic phages can jump from nil to pervasive, as "observed in exponential phase (0.001%) and in stationary phase (about 100%)" [doi:10.1016/S1631-0691(03)00114-8 ] The second trait, in particular, may well have contributed to Falkowski's overnight experience 20 years ago.