evolgen
Posts by this author
August 30, 2007
BioMed Central has posted videos of interviews of some notable scientists. Included is a video of friend of evolgen (and enemy of Prof. Steve Steve) Michael Ashburner espousing the virtues of open access. Ashburner was a signatory on the letter to Science encouraging publishers to make their…
August 30, 2007
A group of researchers from France and Italy have sequenced the genome of the finest grape varietal, Pinot Noir. The genome has hallmarks of ancient triploidization, shared by other dicotyledons, but there is no evidence for recent polyploidization. That meant sequencing and assembling this genome…
August 29, 2007
That's the poster for the upcoming football season at Penn State. It's purpose is both utilitarian (it's got the schedule of games printed on it) and motivational (it's supposed to get you all geeked up for the upcoming season). This year's poster is using the slogan "FIGHT ON!", and I bet someone…
August 26, 2007
Why should advisers encourage their students to publish? For the answer, read this post by TR Gregory.
Why is the publishing industry afraid of open access? I can't answer that question, but I can point you to the evidence for their fear: it's right here. Jonathan Eisen points out why PRISM, the…
August 25, 2007
Remember the story about how we inherited the gene that gives us human brains from Neanderthals? The genetic data that were used to reach that conclusion (or a slightly less over-the-top conclusion) were part of a couple of other studies that identified signatures of adaptive evolution in genes…
August 23, 2007
The University of Michigan has put out a press release entitled:
Bits of 'junk' RNA aid master tumor-suppressor gene
With a title like that, how could I not blog the hell out of this bastard? I mean, they even put the scare quotes around "junk". Like that -- like I just did. Amazing!
The story is…
August 21, 2007
Nautilus, Nature's blog for authors, has a guest post by Robin Rose on long author lists, entitled "What's an author?". The post is representative of a certain brand of curmudgeonliness mixed with a dash of either ignorance or naivete. Rose has seen author list with more than 20 authors, and he's…
August 20, 2007
There's been a lot of recent interest in sequences that are highly conserved between humans and other mammals (and even other non-mammalian vertebrates). These sequences are thought to be under purifying selection, which prevents the accumulation of substitutions after two evolutionary lineages…
August 17, 2007
I'd be remiss to not mention this paper from Hopi Hoekstra's group after I previously discussed the anti-evo-devo paper she wrote with Jerry Coyne. The premise of the paper from Hoekstra and Coyne is that Sean Carroll overplays the importance of cis-regulatory changes in the evolution of form.…
August 15, 2007
Finally, using a series of related MMEJ substrates, we investigated the inhibitory effect of Pku70 on fission yeast MMEJ unraveled in this study and the impact of both length and position of the microhomologous region on MMEJ efficiency.
That quote comes at the end of the introduction of this…
August 14, 2007
Peter Lawrence has an opinion piece in Current Biology on the problems with evaluating scientists, amongst other things. He hits upon a few important points, including journal impact factors, the cost of high risk research, hyping up publications, and networking with the right people to improve…
August 13, 2007
King and Wilson are the bee's knees for all the kids who want to hype the effect of gene expression divergence between humans and chimps. The argument boils down to a few points: humans and chimps are mad different, their protein sequences are mad similar, therefore expression of the proteins must…
August 12, 2007
Wow, posts at evolgen have been few and far between. A damn, dirty manuscript is to blame. I keep trying to get it write itself, but the sucker refused to oblige. Maybe it would help if I could finish the data analysis.
But enough about me. Let's talk about me Steve Steve. The last time Professor…
August 2, 2007
One of the primary hypotheses of Sean Carroll's model of evo-devo is that cis-regulatory elements (CREs) are the primary drivers of morphological evolution (see here). This hypothesis is controversial in the evolutionary genetics community. Because it's hard to examine the effect of CREs on…
July 22, 2007
Mark Liberman at Language Log has been posting on genetics recently. A couple of days ago he tried to track down the origins of the components of the gene name BTBD9. The letters and numbers in the name stand for complex-tramtrack-bric-a-brac-domain 9, which are hijacked from Drosophila…
July 19, 2007
Bill Hooker has taken Nature editor Maxine Clark to task for her claims about the open access status of the online features offered by the Nature Publishing Group. Maxine points to the various free online services offered by Nature -- including Nature Precedings, Nature Reports, Nature Network,…
July 18, 2007
Remember that new species of leopard that was "discovered" earlier this year? Well, it wasn't really discovered so much as recategorized as a unique species (it was originally discovered in the early nineteenth century). That's a picture of it on the right if you don't remember.
Anyway, there's an…
July 16, 2007
Mike Lynch has been getting a fair bit of hype recently for his nearly neutral model of genome evolution (see here and here). The nearly neutral theory riffs off the idea that the ability of natural selection to purge deleterious mutations and fix advantageous mutations depends on the effective…
July 15, 2007
I've recently come across two articles on junk DNA. The first one, from New Scientist, includes a pretty thorough coverage of recent studies that have identified functions for non-protein-coding regions of the human genome ("Why 'junk DNA' may be useful after all"). The article is set up as if it…
July 12, 2007
The American Institute of Biological Sciences has posted talks from their meeting on Evolutionary Biology and Human Health. Not only have they provided audio and video of the talks, but there are also transcripts and slides that go along with the talks. Very cool.
July 11, 2007
Bad tests for natural selection are bad at detecting selection.
Austin Hughes has published a fairly critical review of some methods used to detect natural selection in protein coding sequences. His attack on current methods for detecting natural selection is threefold. First, he claims that…
July 10, 2007
Dave wants to know whether we biologists have physics envy, as the physicists often claim. I'm quite happy being a biologist and I wouldn't want to study physics, but there are certain skill sets I wish I had. My envy is not for the questions other fields address, but for the tools other people in…
July 9, 2007
I thought I had come to grips with evo-devo. Then along come Hopi Hoekstra and Jerry Coyne to call shenanigans on Sean Carroll's model of evo-devo. This is nothing new for Coyne, but I can't recall Hoekstra ever getting involved in the debate before now.
Before we get to Hoekstra and Coyne, let's…
July 8, 2007
I'm fucking sick of blog memes. Not only do I find online surveys totally lame, I also never get tagged. Boohoo, nobody likes me. Now, John Logsdon orders me to tell you eight things about me. I'm only doing this 'cause we had dinner together last week. Here are the rules:
We have to post these…
July 8, 2007
I've got far too many tabs open in my browser window, and I gotta blog them ASAP so that I can clean up the ol' computer. Here are a few things I've been meaning to blog, in list form:
Nature Genetics has published an issue devoted to structural variation in genomes. There appears to be a bias…
July 8, 2007
The sixteenth edition of Mendel's Garden (the genetics blog carnival) has been posted by Hsien at Eye on DNA. If you'd like to host an upcoming edition of the carnival, you can sign up for the October, November, or December edition by emailing me (evolgen[at]yahoo[dot]com).
July 6, 2007
This week's phylogeny takes a look at the green portion of the eukaryotic tree. These are the eukaryotes capable of photosynthesis. Eukaryotes first obtained the ability to perform photosynthesis when a eukaryotic cell absorbed a photosynthetic cyanobacterium. This was followed by a few subsequent…
July 5, 2007
Last month's issue of Evolution (aka Evolution Int J Org Evolution, aka Evolution (Lawrence Kansas), aka some other confusing way of referring to the journal published by the Society for the Study of Evolution) contains two articles on teaching evolution. The first is on creating museum exhibitions…
July 3, 2007
In a post at the Panda's Thumb, Ian Musgrave cites this paper by Bakewell et al claiming that 154 genes out of 13,888 surveyed show evidence for adaptive evolution in humans since the divergence with chimps (this is the "chimps more evolved than humans" paper). Ian brings this up in a discussion of…
July 1, 2007
The tenth edition of Gene Genie has been posted at Genomicron. Given that TR Gregory is an evolutionary geneticist based in Canada, one is left to wonder why he didn't attend the SMBE meeting. I know Larry Moran was at his daughter's wedding, but what was Gregory's excuse?
Also, the next edition of…