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.

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