February 13, 2023

Physiological patterns are stored in DNA to be used upon signaling by control mechanisms. The reading of DNA is controlled by signal molecules which act through proteins layered onto DNA. As patterns of physiology evolve, they are stored to be used when needed.

An example is the physiology created by a raw food diet. There are signals in a raw food diet that create a physiological pattern of burning away fat while being highly energized. That pattern would have been created during monkey evolution, where monkeys needed to be featherweight for climbing trees. When humans eat a similar diet, that pattern of physiology is reproduced.

My research on the morel mushroom shows how physiological patterns are stored and expressed under suitable conditions. When growing morel mycelium on a flat surface of a gel with optimum nutrition, a pattern of growth would appear with many of the characteristics of the mushroom but flat on the surface. That type of growth was an anomaly, as it would not occur under normal conditions and had no biological relevance.

The morel anomaly contained pigments similar to the original mushroom and some degree of cell structure which shaped the pigments into configurations similar to the surface of the mushroom.

Such an anomaly is not known to occur for any other mushrooms. It occurs for the morel, because the morphology of the morel is not well established, as the morel emerged from the ground very recently in its evolution—about 20 thousand years ago.
 

 
Each of these anomalies is a different phenotype of the same species, as the morel forms a different phenotype for each spore outgrowth. Each pattern was started from a single spore.

There is no natural reason for these anomalies to take form. They just follow a pattern that developed in their recent evolution. The readout of the DNA went through a sequence, even when that sequence was inappropriate, because the morel has not evolved long enough to stabilize the process.

The morphology of the morel is much more fluid than usual, because it needs a lot of variation to cope with the disadvantageous ascospores that it inherited from a yeast.

A filamentous yeast growing at the base of trees reached down into the soil to feed on bacteria. So it acquired a pattern of growing on surfaces, which was needed at the base of trees. It then scrambles those patterns when growing on the surface of a gel in a laboratory. Other types of mushroom mycelium are always white with no complex patterns or pigments.

Here is a sequence showing an anomaly taking form:
 

 
These anomalies show that patterns in DNA are stored and can be used later.