The Eisen Brothers are Rockin' the Genome

And they're doing it open access style.

Jonathan Eisen and Michael Eisen have each published papers in the PLoS journals using newly available genome sequence data. Jonathan is lead on author on the paper describing the genome sequence of the ciliate, Tetrahymena thermophila. He has blogged about the publication here and provides a wrap-up of a bunch of the coverage here. This single celled eukaryote is a model organism for cell biology, although not at the same level as Saccromyces cerevicea.

Michael Eisen's lab is heavily involved in the Drosophila genomes project. He is the senior author on a paper that takes advantage of whole genome sequence from three closely related Drosophilids to compare gene trees and genome trees. The evolutionary relationship of the three species examined -- D. mealongaster, D. erecta, and D. yakuba -- has been the subject of some debate in the literature. Eisen and colleagues showed that disagreements between different gene trees are the result of incomplete lineage sorting. They noticed that sites supporting the same phylogeny tend to be closely linked, and regions of low recombination have large blocks of sites that give the same evolutionary relationships.

If only their brother Rich could make something of his life.

More like this

Historical Inaccuracy Edition A lot of us who work in well established biological systems take for granted how those systems were first discovered or established. Sometimes this involves the choice by an individual to begin studying development using a small worm. Other times it's the fortunate…
The world of genomics is changing. It was initially about sequencing the genome a single representative individual from a particular species. Now, there's a large focus on polymorphism -- that is, sequencing multiple individuals from a single species to study the genomic variation in that species.…
I've been busy this past week (and I'll be busy in the next couple of weeks to come), so I don't have much time to post to evolgen. For this reason this week's Phylogeny Friday is a recycled post from the old site. Check out the comments on the original entry for some remarks from one of the…
Sensing and reacting to one's environment is necessary for survival. Different species have different expertise in regards to how they sense their environment. Humans, for example, have reduced olfactory abilities relative to other mammals, but excellent color vision. Cats have good night vision,…