Perfect for a trivia night or a long trip, #TrainTeasers will both test your knowledge of this country`s rail system and enlighten you on the most colourful aspects of its long history. Meet trunk murderers, trainspotters, haters of railways, railway writers, Ministers for Transport good and bad, railway cats, dogs and a railway penguin. This is NOT a book for number-crunching nerds. Many of the answers are guessable by the intelligent reader. It is a quiz, yes, but also a cavalcade of historical incident and colour relating to a system that was the making of modern Britain.

in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the To grasp the Krebs cycle is to fathom the deep coherence of biology. It connects the first photosynthetic bacteria with our peculiar cells. It links the emergence of consciousness with the inevitability of death. And it puts the subtle differences between individuals in the same grand story as the rise of the living world itself. Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S.

If that’s as clear to your ears as a morning hello, have I got a book for you! Unfortunately, it’s not to me: The tour of the chem lab during my high-school orientation included an eyewash station to save your sight from an errant spray of acid and a furled blanket with which you could smother yourself in case you caught fire. I’ve given chemistry a wide berth ever since. It’s not possible to construct a plausible story by starting with a computer chip. Energy drives everything and life began at an energy gradient. For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work What’s new is that the reactions that make up the Krebs cycle and onwards can occur spontaneously. The Krebs cycle is the engine of life, turning gases into living things. Genes emerged from this metabolic whirl. But now we’re faced with a strange situation: the Krebs cycle simultaneously creates and destroys, giving it a yin and yang that (I argue) still dictates how our genes work, including our risk of diseases. 2. Metabolism gives meaning to genetic information. In glycosis, pyruvate is converted to lactate, allowing the cell to produce small amounts of ATP in the absence of oxygen. Warburg noted the propensity of cancers to ferment glucose in the presence of oxygen. However, many cancers don’t depend on aerobic glycolysis at all, normal tissues are also capable of aerobic glycolysis, and stem cells typically depend on ATP from aerobic glycolysis for their energy needs.

When you were a medical student, you were told to sit down, shut up, raise your hand when you wanted to go to the bathroom, and memorize a whole bunch of strange names of carboxylic acids that make up the Krebs cycle. I thought this was a gigantic waste of time and had nothing to do with the practice of medicine. Although I love this book, it does inevitably suffer part way through from the problems of a biology book being read by non-biologists. To start with I was carried along with enthusiasm engendered by those stories and Lane's novel presentation, but there are a couple of chapters midway through where the sheer volume of molecules named becomes somewhat overwhelming and I had to fight myself not to skip to a more interesting bit. It's hard to see how this could be avoided - but it does remain an issue. On average, we have one SNP every thousand letters, meaning that there are four or five million letters that differ across the human genome. Only a modest proportion of these are likely to influence the risk of a particular disease The reverse Krebs cycle was more widespread on the early Earth before the rise of oxygen. Photosynthesis evolved in the cyanobacteria long after ancient bacteria were converting CO2 and H2 into organic molecules to drive growth. The Shuram conundrum revolves around the evidence that most of the carbon on earth was bound up by sulfate, as shown by the carbon isotope balance in the Shuram formation in Oman. The survivors on the end-Permian extinction were those that had evolved to make use of oxygen and clear out excess CO2 and sulfide. Lane posits that it was at this time that the Kreb's cycle evolved.If I have understood the author's thesis (and this is not 100% certain, but I think so), it could be summarized thusly: The third peculiarity is the genetic code itself. There are clues that hint at direct interactions between the letters in DNA and the amino acids of proteins. This means the code is not random. A random piece of RNA will template a small protein, giving it a sequence that is specified by those non-random interactions. If that speeds up metabolism—the Krebs cycle for example—then the random sequence will be selected. And that means there’s no problem with the origin of information in biology. 3. The first animals evolved through a high-wire metabolic balancing act. The author further explains that life is able to take two gases and turn them into solid matter. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen are quite happy existing as they are, not reacting with anything; however, life lowers the thermodynamic barriers to transforming them and the Krebs cycle is integral to this. Mitochondrial genes tend to evolve much ten to fifty times faster than nuclear genes, as they are copied far more than nuclear genes, and so they accumulate more mutations. A clean-up process in early life sieves out the most detrimental mutations. That’s why mitochondrial diseases directly affect only about 1 in 5,000 of us. The greatest risk factor for cancer is older age: cancer incidence increases exponentially with age. One might think this is explained by the steady accumulation of mutations with age. But the buildup of mutations with age seems to be too slow to explain either cancer or ageing as a process. Nor can it explain why humans do not have a higher cancer rate than, mice, despite having ten times as many rounds of DNA copying to make an individual.

We are so aware of the vast amounts of information stored in our genes, that we sometimes overlook the obvious. There’s no difference in the information content between a living organism and one that died a moment ago. What stopped was metabolism. Pores in hydrothermal vents provide a steady supply of H2 and CO2, in just the right conditions needed to promote their reaction to make carboxylic acids. These form through chemical mechanisms that resemble steps of the reverse Krebs cycle, implying that this chemistry really is the primordial basis for metabolism. Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle―and its reverse―why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today.Over time damage occurs to molecular machinery such as proteins. Repairing or replacing them is one of the most energy-sapping tasks that cells face. Eventually the respiratory machinery itself is damaged, and ROS flux creeps up. Cells do what they must and compensate by suppressing respiration a little. NADH is oxidized less effectively and the Krebs cycle loses forward momentum. Intermediates such as succinate start to accumulate and seep out from the mitochondria. They activate proteins such as HIF1α, which in turn alter the behavior of thousands of genes, pushing cells into a senescent state or to their demise. I reluctantly rate this book 3.5/5. It’s really well-written and enjoyable in spots, but I found myself slogging through the rest. I wouldn’t say that this is a book in search of an audience, but the audience has to be carefully found. From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question, an illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee