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David Ng is Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia - this is a just a fancier way of calling himself a science teacher.
Benjamin Cohen is an Asst. Professor of Science, Tech., and Society at the University of Virginia. He studies the place of S & T in environmental history, policy, and ethics. He also writes other stuff.
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Category: Nature, as in parts, bits, molecular and stuff
Posted on: October 17, 2006 6:01 PM, by David Ng
Well, didn't know about this, but quite interesting nevertheless. That's right folks - the Duckbill is getting the royal genomic treatment. Looks like the sequencing has been done (6X coverage), and now they're looking to piece those contigs together. (link)
I'd be curious to see what the creationist folks would say about this - the platypus being a favourite with them. Maybe some of the DNA sequences translates into scripture?
(Thanks to Joanne)
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Comments
How is the platypus a favourite with creationists? Do they like the idea of a mammal that lays eggs? How about one with a mammary area instead of nipples? What do they find appealing about the lack of vagina?
Posted by: pough | October 17, 2006 7:13 PM
As a platypus of long standing (check the domain) I think this is great news! :)
To answer your question, pough, it seems that the platypus is a favorite political football among creationists because it seems that earlier ancestors of the platypus (e.g. obdurodon) were actually quite a bit larger. The argument, which I trip over quite often when I'm googling for platypus info but rarely bother to examine in detail, seems to be that bigger is better, that getting smaller represents a form of devolution, and that such an outcome contradicts some strawman form of evolution in which development is always "forward" or "upward" or something. It's a silly argument, refuting creationism as much as evolution, but I guess we're not dealing with logical people here.
Posted by: Platypus | October 17, 2006 7:58 PM
That's interesting and also new to me. Never really looked that close except to say that googling the poor animal gets a lot of creationism related hits. I always assumed it had something to do with it's unusual physical characteristics, which ironically is likely the same reason why it was chosen for a genome project.
Posted by: David Ng | October 17, 2006 8:09 PM
Big ups if they get good sequence of the chain of sex chromosomes. This will really help with our understanding of mammalian evolution.
Posted by: RPM | October 17, 2006 8:21 PM
You can find a list of all eukaryote sequencing projects at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/leuks.cgi
part of it can also be seen in the ENSEMBL genome browser
http://www.ensembl.org/index.html
Posted by: sparc | October 18, 2006 12:01 AM