Crypto biology

Cryptobiologists are a diverse lot, ranging from conventional scientists to eccentrics far from the mainstream. All share a dream of discovering elusive or unknown creatures unrecognised by conventional science — and with it their share of instant fame. Some, like the Tasmanian tiger, clearly once existed. Others, such as giant vampire bats, conceivably might exist, having somehow escaped the attentions of conventional scientists.

The third category, oddities such as the Jersey devil and the mothman, are strictly on the fringes. The more credible side of the cryptobiology crowd can be a pretty serious lot. Some, such as tropical ecologist David Bickford of the National University of Singapore and Aaron Bauer, an evolutionary biologist and herpetologist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, are respected mainstream scientists.

Bickford has discovered a number of previously unknown species, including a bizarre lungless frog that lives only beneath waterfalls in Borneo. The most committed cryptobiologists spend big sums of their own money to finance their quests. Some have paid for their efforts in more than money. Roy Mackal, a dedicated chaser of Nessie and mokele-mbembe, an aquatic dinosaur that supposedly lives in the Congo basin, was booted out of the biology department at the University of Chicago; few if any dispute that his cryptid-seeking was the chief cause.

Others endure sneers from their colleagues, a loss of credibility and even academic isolation. Why tolerate such treatment? Tropical biologists commonly find that half or more of the insect species they capture in the rainforest canopy are new to science. Undiscovered fish and other species are frequently found in the deep sea.

Up to half of all the plant species in the Amazon are still scientifically undocumented. Not all of the new discoveries are small or obscure. The Mindoro fruit bat , discovered in the Philippines in , has a 1-metre wingspan. The same year saw the discovery of a venomous snake in Australia and a large electric ray in South Africa. The cryptographic hash and proof-of-work mechanisms of a blockchain can guarantee that the evolutionary trajectory is faithfully documented temporal, lineage, and omic accuracy.

Cryptographic hash functions are one-way functions inputs can only be determined by trial-and-error, not rationally, from outputs that map an arbitrary dataset to a fixed value such as a string of binary digits. Each block contains the hash of the previous block and its own unique hash that is a function of both its intrinsic data and the previous hash, enabling an append-only chain.

A cryptographic hash function can map a single-cell omics signature to a dimension-reduced fingerprint of the cancer. Such processing is realistic given the substantial progress made in computational methods for multimodal integration of single-cell omics data Efremova and Teichmann, Because adjusting the hash conditions modulates the difficulty of adding new blocks, proof-of-work establishes the inter-block timeframe and tunes the temporal resolution of the cancer history.

By establishing a high fidelity cancer history, a blockchain model of cancer evolution may be a powerful model for retrospective lineage tracing. Retrospectively reconstructing cell lineage information is valuable for understanding human diseases because experimental manipulation is impossible Baron and van Oudenaarden, Naturally occurring mutations, such as copy number variations, single-nucleotide variants, LINE-1 transpositions, microsatellite mutations, and mtDNA mutations, can moonlight as endogenous lineage barcodes Woodworth et al.

Integrating a blockchain model with current genetic methods that probe biological memory, such as MemorySeq Shaffer et al. Smart Contracts and Biological Boolean Logic Gates Smart contracts make blockchain an attractive platform to encode Boolean logic gates for biological systems. Originally conceptualized by Nick Szabo and eventually integrated with the Ethereum blockchain by Vitalik Buterin, smart contracts are protocols that automatically execute upon fulfillment of certain conditions and enjoy all the cardinal features of blockchain such as decentralization, immutability, and validity.

For example, instead of hiring a real estate broker, smart contracts on a blockchain can automatically process the sale of property via an agreement that cannot be lost or fraudulently altered. Both smart contracts and Boolean logic gates share core principles of conditionality. Smart contracts are classically programmed using the procedural language Solidity.

Procedural languages outline step-by-step how a process is performed, whereas declarative languages define what goal must be met. Considerable efforts have been made to shift toward declarative programming to create logic-based smart contracts that are less error-prone and ambiguous than traditional smart contracts Idelberger et al. As knowledge of molecular mechanisms and signaling pathways rapidly grows, Boolean logic gates offer a powerful approach to model complex networks and extract relevant biological relationships Morris et al.

Beyond modeling and analysis, boolean logic gates are integral for synthetic biological systems and networks with wide-ranging applications such as biosensing, pharmaceuticals, and biofuels Khalil and Collins, Importantly, Boolean logic gating facilitates the development of highly specific and selective therapeutics, particularly monoclonal antibodies and chimeric antigen receptor CAR T cells. Conditionally functional AND-gated antibodies based on binary toggling between phosphorylated and non-phosphorylated states have been synthesized Gunnoo et al.

Because Boolean logic gates are central to synthetic biology, logic-based smart contracts present a novel computational approach to modeling biochemical circuits. A central component of synthetic biological circuits is assaying output and performance, and this is often achieved by detecting fluorescent reporters Brophy and Voigt, However, fluorescent reporters have limitations such as a requirement for artificial overexpression and susceptibility to protein degradation.

Furthermore, encoding more advanced outputs such as oscillation, which requires co-expression of repressors Gilad and Shapiro, , and permitting multiplexing can be challenging. Because smart contracts serve to eliminate third-party confirmation, logic-based smart contracts can eliminate the need for individual reporters directly downstream of individual biological Boolean logic gates and shift the burden of verification to a global, blockchain-based reporter instead Figure 1B.

Confidence that biological Boolean logic gates function correctly can be attributed to trust in a blockchain, which can be designed to be a ledger of the state of a particular cell for example. This simplification is valuable for complex networks and may facilitate efforts to engineer dynamic and multiplexed circuits.

As evidenced by recent advances in adapting machine learning algorithms to design gene circuits Hiscock, , computational methods like blockchain should be utilized in tandem with experimental techniques to maximize synthetic biology capabilities. Discussion Blockchain technology remains under-tapped. Specifically, blockchain-based retrospective lineage tracing and monitoring multiplexed biochemical circuits are proposed.

Considerable development is needed to advance blockchain technology to a functional computational biology paradigm. For example, what data should go on-chain vs. How will available experimental methods inform blockchain models in biology? In addition to expanding the range of biological contexts amenable to interrogation by blockchain principles, significant methods development is crucial.

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This may occur during a closer examination by experts or upon confession of the hoaxer. Science writer Sharon A. Hill observes that the Young Earth creationist segment of cryptozoology is "well-funded and able to conduct expeditions with a goal of finding a living dinosaur that they think would invalidate evolution. Card says that " Creationists have embraced cryptozoology and some cryptozoological expeditions are funded by and conducted by creationists hoping to disprove evolution.

He observes that "[p]eople who actively search for Loch Ness monsters or Mokele Mbembe do it entirely as creationist ministers. They think that if they found a dinosaur in the Congo it would overturn all of evolution. It wouldn't. It would just be a late-occurring dinosaur, but that's their mistaken notion of evolution. Thomas comments that, "while the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter are flirting with pseudoarchaeology , coquettishly whispering pseudoarchaeological rhetoric, they are each fully in bed with cryptozoology" and observes that "Young-earth creationists and cryptozoologists make natural bed fellows.

As with pseudoarchaeology, both young-earth creationists and cryptozoologists bristle at the rejection of mainstream secular science and lament a seeming conspiracy to prevent serious consideration of their claims.

Media coverage of purported "cryptids" often fails to provide more likely explanations, further propagating claims made by cryptozoologists. Card summarizes cryptozoology in a survey of pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology : Cryptozoology purports to be the study of previously unidentified animal species. At first glance, this would seem to differ little from zoology. New species are discovered by field and museum zoologists every year. Cryptozoologists cite these discoveries as justification of their search but often minimize or omit the fact that the discoverers do not identify as cryptozoologists and are academically trained zoologists working in an ecological paradigm rather than organizing expeditions to seek out supposed examples of unusual and large creatures.

He finds parallels with cryptozoology and other pseudosciences, such as ghost hunting and ufology , and compares the approach of cryptozoologists to colonial big-game hunters, and to aspects of European imperialism. According to Card, "Most cryptids are framed as the subject of indigenous legends typically collected in the heyday of comparative folklore , though such legends may be heavily modified or worse. Cryptozoology's complicated mix of sympathy, interest, and appropriation of indigenous culture or non-indigenous construction of it is also found in New Age circles and dubious " Indian burial grounds " and other legends Ward says that "Cryptozoology It is monster hunting.

Regal says that "as an intellectual endeavor, cryptozoology has been studied as much as cryptozoologists have sought hidden animals". Beliefs in the existence of fabulous and supernatural animals are ubiquitous and timeless. In the continents discovered by Europe indigenous beliefs and tales have strongly influenced the perceptions of the conquered confronted by a new natural environment.

Because crustal organisms are only metabolically active when wet, re-establishment time is slow in arid systems. While cyanobacteria are mobile, and can often move up through disturbed sediments to reach needed light levels for photosynthesis, lichens and mosses are incapable of such movement, and often die as a result. On newly disturbed surfaces, mosses and lichens often have extremely slow colonization and growth rates.

Assuming adjoining soils are stable and rainfall is average, recovery rates for lichen cover in southern Utah have been most recently estimated at a minimum of 45 years, while recovery of moss cover was estimated at years Belnap, Because of such slow recolonization of soil surfaces by the different crustal components, underlying soils are left vulnerable to both wind and water erosion for at least 20 years after disturbance Belnap and Gillette, Because soils take 5, to 10, years to form in arid areas such as in southern Utah Webb, , accelerated soil loss may be considered an irreversible loss.

Loss of soil also means loss of site fertility through loss of organic matter, fine soil particles, nutrients, and microbial populations in soils Harper and Marble, ; Schimel et al. Moving sediments further destabilize adjoining areas by burying adjacent crusts, leading to their death, or by providing material for "sandblasting" nearby surfaces, thus increasing wind erosion rates Belnap, ; McKenna-Neumann et al.

Soil erosion in arid lands is a global problem. Beasley et al. Relatively undisturbed biological soil crusts can contribute a great deal of stability to otherwise highly erodible soils. Unlike vascular plant cover, crustal cover is not reduced in drought, and unlike rain crusts, these organic crusts are present year-round. Consequently, they offer stability over time and under adverse conditions that is often lacking in other soil surface protectors.

However, disturbed crusts now cover vast areas in the western United States as a result of ever-increasing recreational and commercial uses of these semi-arid and arid areas. Based on the results of several studies McKenna-Neumann et al. Gregory, and T. Belnap, J. Monsen and S G. Kitchen, eds. Gardner, , Soils microstructure in soils of the Colorado Plateau: the role of the cyanobacterium Microcoleus vaginatus: Great Basin Naturalist, v. In Press. Harper, , The influence of cryptobiotic soil crusts on elemental content of tissue of two desert seed plants: Arid Soil Research and Rehabilitation, v.

Beymer, R. Klopatek, , Potential contribution of carbon by microphytic crusts in pinyon-juniper woodlands: Arid Soil Research and Rehabilitation v. Evans, R. Ehleringer, , Broken nitrogen cycles in arid lands: Evidence from 15N of soils: Oecologia v. Gillette, D. Adams, A. Endo, D. Smith, and R. Kihl, , Threshold velocities for input of soil particles into the air by desert soils: Journal of Geophysical Research, v.

Harper, K. Marble, , A role for nonvascular plants in management of arid and semiarid rangelands, in P. Tueller, ed. Pendleton, , Cyanobacteria and cyanolichens: can they enhance availability of essential minerals for higher plants?

Johansen, J. Mayland, H. McIntosh, , Availability of biologically fixed atmosphere nitrogen to higher plants: Nature, v. McKenna-Neumann et al. Maxwell, and J. Bolton, , Wind transport of sand surface with photoautotrophic microorganisms: Catena, v. Metting, B. Skujins, ed.

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