I'm trying to emerge from hibernation, and I'll hopefully have some good blogging material up in the next few days. In lieu of my own ideas, I'm going to link to what other people have written. Read them, because I ain't saying much right now. The list can be found below the fold.
- Neil Saunders points us to this article from the BBC on a new function for "junk DNA". I hope Neil is right: "one day the term 'junk DNA' will fall into disuse."
- John Hawks has a good discussion of a recent paper on inferring population size using mtDNA. Apparently cytoplasmic DNA is under selection, and that, combined with the low recombination rate, makes it a poor neutral marker.
- The Contingency Table summarizes how genomic data can be used to detect natural selection. The idea here is that if you have multiple loci, you can generate an empirical distribution of your favorite statistic and look for loci that are significant outliers.
- The upcoming issue of Nature will contain an article on a highly conserved non-protein-coding sequence that is derived from a transposable element (read a summary of the article here). The authors hypothesize that the motifs may play an important role in the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates.
More like this
When we look at a the data for a population+ often the first thing we do
is look at the mean. But even if we know that the distribution
I love this question:
Why is it warmer in the summer than in the winter (for the Northern hemisphere)?
Go ahead and ask your friends. I suppose they will give one of the following likely answers:
Technorati Tags: ddftw, bozos,
markcc-screwups
Last week we looked at the organ systems involved in regulation and control of body functions: the nervous, sensory, endocrine and circadian systems. This week, we will cover the organ systems that are regulated and controlled.