biology
evolgen | March 9, 2006Today marks the birthday of our venerable godfather (er, atheist-father?) here at ScienceBlogs, PZ Myers. I am honored and grateful that I have been invited to PZ Myers's . . . birthday . . . on the day of PZ Myers's birthday. And I hope that his first post be a cephalopod post. In appreciation of the blogfather, Grrlscientist is staging a surprise party -- a blogasm of posts -- for Doc Myers. My contribution can be found below the fold. I'm hoping that a list of all of the birthday posts will be compiled at Living the Scientific Life.
Shhh! Quick, hide behind that tree, the Lamarckian…
evolgen | March 8, 2006Kevin White (aka, Mr. Drosophila microarray data) has a paper coming out in tomorrow's issue of Nature. The paper (which is not available on the Nature website yet) compares the expression of over 1,000 genes from humans, chimpanzees, orangutans and rhesus monkeys. From a news write up of the findings:
When they also looked for human genes with significantly higher or lower expression levels, they found 14 genes with increased expression and five with decreased expression. While only ten percent of the genes in the total array were transcription factors, 42 percent of those with increased…
jlynch | March 7, 2006French biologists have apparently discovered a new species of lobster, Kiwi hirsuta at a depth of 7,540 feet, 900 miles south of Easter Island. Thing is, it's blind ... and has limbs covered with "sinuous, hair-like strands" (source).
evolgen | March 3, 2006Today, I will begin a new tradition at evolgen. There are a lot of topics and terms in the biological sciences that sound like something else; many of these fall into the category of double entendre. I'm quite immature, so that kinda stuff really amuses me. Every Friday I'll try to come up with another double entendre for your enjoyment. Reader submissions would be greatly appreciated.
For today's evolgen Double Entendre Friday, I give you the cleavage furrow. Yes, cleavage, as in these things. During mitosis, after all the genetic material is sorted out, the cell splits all of its…
evolgen | March 2, 2006I have posted on microbial diversity in the soil previously. Tara pointed out that even though we are just now learning about what ecological factors determine soil microbial diversity, we also have a lot to learn about microbial diversity within the human digestive tract. She asked:
I wonder what a meta-analysis of the diversity of human-associated bacteria would find? For example, we already know that diversity can vary even by location within the colon; we also know that the pH of different areas in the body can vary (due not only to bodily secretions but also other bacterial flora that…
evolgen | February 28, 2006There's a fun article in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology on what distinguishes a good scientific meeting from a not so good one. The author advocates attending small meetings or workshops (under 100 people), which is tough for a young scientist. Small workshops are usually either not well advertised or difficult to get to. The only small meetings that I attend are local meetings, and the only workshops I go to are the workshops that are hosted at larger meetings. For a young scientist, large nation/international meetings allow for the most interaction with the most people in your…
evolgen | February 26, 2006My advisor received an email from a fairly prominent geneticist regarding some results published by Dobzhansky over fifty years ago. The geneticist had done some back of the envelope calculations and noticed some trends that had been overlooked for a half of a century. We happened to have the animals to replicate the experiments (and I was planning on doing some similar experiments) so my advisor had me perform the crosses. I ended up with a negative result -- I did not see the same trends that Dobzhanksy and colleagues observed. I guess you could say my negative result was a positive…
evolgen | February 24, 2006My apologies for the utter lack of posting over the past week. I've got stuff sitting around waiting to be written about, and I just haven't been writing. I'm not going to make excuses; I just haven't been managing my time well. While you wait for me to post again (soon, I promise), I give you this article on "intelligently designing" promiscuous enzymes to perform specific functions. Here's a quote from the write up:
According to the theory of divergent molecular evolution, primordial enzymes and other proteins started out as "promiscuous" so that primitive organisms would be better able…
evolgen | February 16, 2006Fans of the American version of The Office know that the show glorifies the intersection of I-81 and I-84, also known as Scranton, PA. They also know that Jim Halpert moonlights as the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, but that's for another day. What they may not know is that Scranton has been named the worst city for asthma in the United States. This does not mean that asthma has a difficult time living in Scranton (I hear he likes it quite a bit there), but that if you have asthma you do not want to live in Scranton. Can we blame this on Michael?
evolgen | February 15, 2006I was sitting in a small seminar today (about 20 people in a conference room) when someone walked in about 10 minutes late for the talk. This didn't bother the presenter, and I'm not even sure if everyone saw this person walk in (I was sitting particularly close to the door). It wasn't that she was walking into the seminar late that bothered me -- we all get caught up doing things only to realize that we nearly missed an appointment -- but how she walked in. I'm sure everyone has walked into a talk after it has begun, and, depending on whether it's a lab meeting, departmental seminar, or…
evolgen | February 14, 2006Stew from Flags and Lollipops has begun a new life science blog aggregator, postgenomic. Here is how he describes it:
Postgenomic aggregates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.
For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of what news stories are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently.
It's sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire biomed blogging community.
Sort of.
He asks that you add…
evolgen | February 13, 2006Nick Anthis points us to the best satire of Valentine's Day: Valinetine's Day. The holiday is named after the amino acid valine, and is celebrated with nerdy, yet sexy, poetry. Nick offers up some examples of valinetine poems, such as this one to the theme of tumor suppressor genes:
You've wounded me, dear;
And how can it be?
You've reached in and disabled
My p53.
Something is growing,
You've heard the rumour
Love grows in my heart
And it isn't a tumor.
--Josh Siepel
I don't have any poetry to offer you, but Nick has posted a bunch on his site. I'm surprised no one incorporated cleavage…
jlynch | February 12, 2006Assassin spiders - 2mm long arachnids with elongated jaws (and necks) that were once globally distributed but are now only found in Australia, South Africa and Madagascar. In the latter, nine new species have been recently found by California Academy of Sciences researchers, Charles Griswold and Hannah Wood. Check this out ...
Wow. Darwin would have loved that!
evolgen | February 9, 2006The first ever edition of the Animalcules blog carnival has been posted at Aetiology. Go read about those wee little things that you can't see with you naked eye.
evolgen | February 4, 2006It has always bothered me when certain scientific publications get a lot of popular press despite the fact that the results are not that revolutionary. But the general public probably does not care to learn about a discovery in some esoteric discipline, so I understand that bias. What irks me more is the bias in high impact journals to publish sexy publications even if the science is limited. A correspondence to Nature addresses this issue:
"The broad audience of Nature forces its editors to pre-screen papers according to how appealing they will be for its readers, even if appeal and…
evolgen | February 2, 2006There are quite a few articles sitting around on my desktop waiting for me to write about them. It's gotten to the point where I just need to unload them on the blogosphere. Click through below the fold for some cool stuff from the scientific literature.
More on Neutrality from Laurence Hurst and Colleagues -- I just wrote about the nearly neutral theory, and here is an analysis of selection on silent sites in the human genome. Is this a coincidence or was this article subconsciously on my mind? From the abstract:
"At least in species with large populations, even synonymous mutations in…
jlynch | February 2, 2006
This is Paedocrypsis, a cyprinid fish that is less than one centimeter in length. PZ has blogged on it here in the past. Unfortunately, as PZ now notes, it looks like the species has gone extinct only weeks afier being formally described.
What little we know about the species is contained in Kotellat et al. (in press) "Paedocypris, a new genus of Southeast Asian cyprinid fish with a remarkable sexual dimorphism, comprises the world's smallest vertebrate" Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3419. The abstract reads:
Paedocypris is a new genus…
evolgen | February 2, 2006What is the 'string theory' of your field?
Following the success of Chad's last two memes I've decided to pose my own question. From the outside, it looks like string theory is a legitimate research area that is controversial amongst non-string-theorists. It appears to be misunderstood or unappreciated. Some physicists (yeah, I hate the way I phrased that . . . I'm sorry) do not think there is anything worth learning from string theory. Just to clarify, intelligent design is not the string theory of evolutionary biology -- no one takes it seriously. Maybe something like evolutionary…
grrlscientist | February 2, 2006
Hey everyone, I and the Bird, issue #16, is hosted by my good friends, Dharma Bums. In honor of their issue of this bird carnival, the Bums present Birdstock, a online virtual concert and celebration of wild birds.
BirdStock 2006 features a fantastic group of performers from around the world (including me), all here to sing songs of birds. Some write poems or present photographs, some count birds and some hold them in their hands and heal them, others paint pictures of their inspiring beauty. But each of us in our own way sings a song of praise and delight, love and appreciation for these…