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I am the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science). My job is to try to motivate you to comment on the papers there. My scientific specialty is chronobiology (circadian rhythms and photoperiodism), with additional interests in comparative physiology, animal behavior and evolution. You can contact me at: Coturnix@gmail.com

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Bloggie Stuff

Genetics:

A cellular riddle

It takes 38 minutes for the E.coli genome to replicate. Yet, E.coli can bo coaxed to divide in a much shorter time: 20 minutes. How is this possible? Larry poses the riddle and provides the solution. The key is that...

Yay for Platypus!

The genome of the Platypus has been sequenced: The first analysis of the genome sequence of the duck-billed platypus was published today by an international team of scientists, revealing clues about how genomes were organized during the early evolution of...

Microbial genomics in PLoS

Considering this I am kinda baffled by this. There is tons of microbial metagenomics and genomics in PLoS journals....

Interview with Svante Paabo

Imagine: An Interview with Svante Paabo: Svante Paabo works on the edge of what's possible. He ignites our imagination, unlocking tightly held secrets in ancient remains. By patiently and meticulously working out techniques to extract genetic information from skin, teeth,...

Genomics Blogger Dissed by the New York Times

Or, perhaps, the truth is more complicated, as revealed in the comments of that post....

Congratulations to Karen James!

Excitement on science blogs! Karen James of the Beagle Project Blog has just today published a paper in PLoS ONE: Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) for Pan-Genomic Evolutionary Studies of Non-Model Organisms: Background High-throughput tools for pan-genomic study, especially the DNA...

Viruses in the Oceans: join the latest Journal Club

Brendan Bohannan, Richard W. Castenholz, Jessica Green and their students and postdcos at the Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Oregon are currently doing a Journal Club on the PLoS ONE article The Sorcerer II Global Ocean...

DNA barcoding

I tried to understand what DNA barcoding is, as everyone is talking about it. And I tried reading a couple of papers about it - I am a biologist, so I should have understood them, but nope, I was still...

Intelligently Designed DNA

Someone did it. Get a prize if you correctly identify which one is intelligently designed. In both cases, the designer was an intelligent.....human. Of course. No media reports yet of bioengineering labs run by chimps, dogs, elephants or dolphins....

The Hopeless Monster? Not so fast!

Olivia Judson wrote a blog post on her NYTimes blog that has many people rattled. Why? Because she used the term "Hopeful Monster" and this term makes many biologists go berserk, foaming at the mouth. And they will not, with...

Clocks and Migratory Orientation in Monarch Butterflies

I had no time to read this in detail and write a really decent overview here, perhaps I will do it later, but for now, here are the links and key excerpts from a pair of exciting new papers in...

Grapevine Genomes

Two grape genomes were published this year, one in Nature, the other in PLoS ONE. Larry Moran explains the methodologies and results of both and discusses the trustworthiness of each. The Nature paper is explained in The Grapevine Genome, and...

Has the word "gene" outlived its usefulness?

When Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word "gene" back in 1909 (hmmm, less than two years until the Centennial), the word was quite unambiguous - it meant "a unit of heredity". Its material basis, while widely speculated on, was immaterial for...

Meet Fred Gould (sans mosquitoes) over pizza

Another thing I will also have to miss - the Inaugural Event of the 2007-2008 Pizza Lunch Season of the Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC), on October 24th at Sigma Xi Center (the same place where we'll have the...

Genes vs./plus Environment

My former SciBling David Dobbs regularly posts on the SciAm Blog, usually bringing in guest contributors highlighting novel research in neuroscience. Today, he invited Charles Glatt to review an interesting study on the interaction between genes and environment in development...

Rethinking FOXP2

Earlier studies have indicated that a gene called FOXP2, possibly involved in brain development, is extremely conserved in vertebrates, except for two notable mutations in humans. This finding suggested that this gene may in some way be involved in the...

J. Craig Venter, thoroughly exposed...

...that is, if you still think that a genome sequence tells all secrets about someone's success in science etc. ;-) But the new paper actually uses Venter's personal genome to do some nifty stuff, as this is the first time...

Can a virus make you fat?

If you are a bird, yes. If you are a human, perhaps. Stay tuned....

New on PLoS - Genetics and Computational Biology

Lots of new papers just got published in PLoS-Genetics and PLoS-Computational Biology. Here are a couple of papers that caught my eye: From Morphology to Neural Information: The Electric Sense of the Skate: The electric sense appears in a...

A Geneticist in Chernobyl

Remember when we discussed the mammal vs. bird survival at Chernobyl the other day? Well, I learned today that someone is about to go and study the humans there as well. I am not exactly sure what kind of reserch...

Everything Important Cycles

Microarrays have been used in the study of circadian expression of mammalian genes since 2002 and the consensus was built from those studies that approximately 15% of all the genes expressed in a cell are expressed in a circadian manner....

Obligatory Reading of the Day

Evolution of direct development in echinoderms It's been several years since I last heard Rudolf Raff talk about his work and apparently he's been busy in the meantime. The new stuff is exciting, and PZ knows how to explain it...

Complexity

Larry just won the Triple Crown (or a trifecta, betting on the Triple Crown) with the third post in a trio of posts on a very important topic: Facts and Myths Concerning the Historical Estimates of the Number of Genes...

Sleep Genes are not the same as 'Genes for sleep'

Back in the late 1990s, when people first started using various differential screens, etc. looking for elusive "genes for sleep", I wrote in my written prelims (and reprinted it on my blog several years later): Now the sleep researchers are...

Flirting under Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night, or, The Secret Night-Life of Fruitflies

Review of some very cool new papers on Drosophila circadian clocks

Direct Spanish ancestry of the Shackleford wild horses

Shackleford ponies are often in the media around here. Some love them, some hate them, some want to preserve them, some to exterminate them, and it is not easy to get all the surplus horses adopted each year. Perhaps the...

Did I frame that wrong?

As you know, the last several days saw quite a flurry of blog posts about framing science. I posted my thoughts here and I keep updating my post with links to all the new posts as they show up (except...

How many things are wrong with this study?

Here, have a go at it. Even better, if you can get the actual paper and dissect it on your blog, let me know so I can link to that. Have fun! Good Behavior, Religiousness May Be Genetic: A new...

Stem Cell Experiment in The Scientist

On The Scientist website you can find their new experimental feature - an article with questions to the public that will be used in forming the articles for the print version of the magazine next month. Go see Special Feature:...

Genes, green caterpillars and brown caterpillars

About a year ago, there was a great paper about polyphenism in moth caterpillars. Now, in the new issue of Seed Magazine, PZ Myers uses that example to teach you all about it. Cool reading on one of my favourite...

Aquatic Microbial Diversity

Today is a big day on Plos-Biology for the Oceanic Microbial Diversity Genomics. Last night they published not one, not two, but three big papers chockfull of data. Accompani\ying them are not one, not two, not three, not even four,...

DNA can look really pretty...

...when painted base-by-base....

Horse Genome Assembled!

Just got this exciting news by e-mail: Data on Equine Genome Freely Available to Researchers Worldwide BETHESDA, Md., Wed., Feb. 7, 2007 - The first draft of the horse genome sequence has been deposited in public databases and is freely...

Just smelling food will make you live shorter - if you are a fruitfly

Just quickly for now without commentary: Totally cool paper in the last Science: S. Libert, J. Zwiener, X. Chu, W. VanVoorhies, G. Roman, and S.D.Pletcher Regulation of Drosophila lifespan by olfaction and food-derived odors: Smell is an ancient sensory system...

Gene?

In the series of "Basic Concept And Terms" (yup, I know, John is well known for misspelling people's last names, including mine), several people have already chimed in with their own definitions of the "gene", demonstrating how unclear this concept...

Cloning Domesticated Animals: Pros and Cons

Food From Cloned Animals Safe? FDA Says Yes, But Asks Suppliers To Hold Off For Now: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued three documents on the safety of animal cloning -- a draft risk assessment; a proposed...

Do We Also Taste Just Like Chicken?

Perhaps. But we do other stuff just like chicken (December 09, 2004):...

Bioengineering a safer mosquito

Scientists building a better mosquito: Without mosquitoes, epidemics of dengue fever and malaria could not plague this planet. The skin-piercing insects infect one person after another while dining on a favorite meal: human blood. Eliminating the pests appears impossible. But...

GeneBlogging of the Month

Mendel's Garden #9: Gene-gle Bells Edition is up on Salamander Candy...

Honeybee genome completed!

The honeybee genome project has been finished and a bunch of papers are coming out tomorrow. As soon as they become available online I will comment, at least on the one paper that shows that the molecular machinery of the...

Morlocks and Eloi, oy vey!

Razib and commenters are commenting on this article which appears to be 19th century SF-fantasy repackaged as "serious science" about the future evolution of the human species. Actually, the article is so silly, Razib does not even want to waste...

Genetics blogging of the week

Mendel's Garden #8: Harvest Edition is up on Discoverying Biology in a Digital World....

Perhaps on another planet, it really is like that....

In the light of this years' Nobel Prizes in Physiology and Chemistry (all RNA all the time), it would be interesting to think how would transcription, translation, gene regulation and replication work if DNA has evolved to be like this!?...

New study on evolution of vision

For easy-to-understand quick look at the evolution of vision I have to refer you to these two posts by PZ Myers, this post of mine, and these two posts by Carl Zimmer. Now, armed with all that knowledge, you will...

Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology

As you have probably heard already, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of RNA interference. Jake Young explains what RNAi are and what they do and why is this so revolutionary....

Development of Spots on Buterfly Wings

A really cool new study: DailyScience: How Butterflies Got Their Spots: A 'Supergene' Controls Wing Pattern Diversity: To explore the genetic backgrounds of each of these species, the authors crossed different races of each species and genotyped the offspring in...

That Fruitfly Will Beat You Up

Fruit Fly Aggression Studies Have Relevance To Humans, Animals: Researchers in the North Carolina Sate University genetics department have identified a suite of genes that affect aggression in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, pointing to new mechanisms that could contribute...

Francis Collins is in town

A Community Genetics Forum 2006: Finding the Genome is a 3-day conference here in the Triangle. I will try to go to the third day events on Saturday, 10am - 3pm. It is a very medically oriented meeting, so I...

ERVs in sheep, though essential, do not make them smart

Remember this post from a couple of weeks ago? It was quite popular on tagging sites like Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon. It was about endogenous retroviruses and their role in the evolution of placenta (which made the evolution of other...

Genetics carnival

Mendel's Garden #5 is up on Evolgen....

My hair-stylist had to buy sheep-shearing clippers for me

Now, this is the gene that was meant to be named "hairy" instead of this one: Hirsute-s You, Sir! Could Super Furry Animals Provide Clues For Baldness?: The team found that cells given the genetic command to become hair follicles...

Did A Virus Make You Smart?

Not really a review of Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children" but musing (practically SF itself) on the topic of these books (from April 20, 2005):...

Books: "Coming To Life" by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Several ScienceBloggers are reviewing Coming To Life today (see reviews by Janet, Shelley, RPM, Nick and PZ Edit: Razib has also posted his take), each one of us from a different perspective and looking from a different angle, so go...

A long stroll through the geneticist's garden

Mendel's Garden #4 is up on The Innoculated Mind...

Bring back the mammoth, or, not so fast!

Archy is on top of the story, as usual when the story is about people trying to resurrect mammoths!...

Zebrafish Rules!

I hope PZ will comment on this study: A humble aquarium fish may be the key to finding therapies capable of preventing the structural birth defects that account for one out of three infant deaths in the United States today.That...

Clock Genetics - A Short History

A short post from April 17, 2005 that is a good starting reference for more detailed posts covering recent research in clock genetics.

Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Bio::Blogs #2 is up on Neil Saunder's blog....

Mendel's Garden #3

Mendel's Garden, the carnival of genetics, is up on Viva La Evolucion....

Hot Peppers

I had lunch with Anton yesterday. We talked about the upcoming busy blogging Fall and he showed me his new book. We ate in my neck of the woods, at Town Hall Grill in Southern Village in Chapel Hill. Anton...

Deceptive Metaphor of the Biological Clock

Sometimes a metaphor used in science is useful for research but not so useful when it comes to popular perceptions. And sometimes even scientists come under the spell of the metaphor. One of those unfortunate two-faced metaphors is the metaphor...

What color were the mammoths?

Archy has the answer....

Tau Mutation in Context

A broad look at the new paper on the way Tau mutation works in the mammalian circadian clock.

JETLAG - new circadian gene in Drosophila

In the beginning, there was period. Before 1995, the only known circadian clock genes were period (Per) in Drosophila melanogaster (wine fly) and frequency (Frq) in Neurospora crassa (bread mold). Some mutations, though not characterized at the molecular level,...

A New Carnival!

Pedro Beltrao, who blogs on Public Rambling is starting Bio::Blogs, a carnival of bioinformatics and computational biology....

Pediatric Garden

The very first edition of Mendel's Garden, the carnival of genetics, is up on The Force That Through.... Pediatric Grand Rounds, Volume 1 Edition 5, is up on Unintelligent Design....

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