development
pharyngula | April 29, 2013Today was the last day I lecture at my developmental biology students. We have one more lab and one final class hour which will be all about assessment, but this was my last chance to pontificate at them…so I told them about all the things I didn't teach them, and gave them a reading list for the summer. (I know, there's no way they're going to take these to the beach, but maybe when they move on in their careers they'll remember that little reference in their notes and look it up.)
So here are the books I told them to go read.
We've been all up in the evo-devo house this semester, so I urged…
pharyngula | April 26, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
I've been terrible about updating everyone about my class the last few weeks — we're coming up on the end of the semester, so I've been going a little bit mad. We've been focusing on vertebrate development lately, and right now we've got a few dozen fertilized chicken eggs…
pharyngula | April 15, 2013It's a frog tadpole with an eye surgically grafted to its trunk!
Wait, this is an old story — similar experiments were done at least 20 years ago. You can transplant developing eyes to the tadpole, but the cool thing is that the donor optic nerves will grow into the sensory tracts of the dorsal spinal cord and grow anteriorly to the optic tectum, where they will make functional connections. Not, as I recall, adequate for image formation, but at least good enough that the tadpole will startle if a light is flashed at the eye in its tail.
I did kind of go "ugh" at the spin the story put on it…
pharyngula | April 10, 2013This is a cool video from a textbook publisher (Molecular Biology of the Cell, a very good text) illustrating how Spemann/Mangold's famous organizer experiment was done.
Also cool: those are apparently Edward De Robertis' hands doing the experiment.
pharyngula | March 29, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
I'm out of town! Class is canceled today! But still, my cold grip extends across the Cascades, over the Palouse, the Rockies, the Dakota badlands, the old homeland of the American bison, the the great farms of the midwestern heartland, to a small town in western Minnesota,…
pharyngula | March 25, 2013This is a new one for me. Earlier today I was summoned on Twitter to address an assertion by a creationist, @jarrydtrokis. I was slightly boggled.
He was baffled by eyelid development. It seems he thinks it requires…intelligent design!.
... Here's one for you to ponder :) Eye lids in the womb... How are they formed? #IntelligentDesign?
Wait, what? What's mystifying about eyelid formation?
The section of skin in the middle dies... How does it know to do that? And in a perfectly straight line???
Oh. It forms a straight line. Whoa. And he claims to have done research to get the answer.
The…
pharyngula | March 25, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
We've been talking about flies nonstop for the last month — it's been nothing but developmental genetics and epistasis and gene regulation in weird ol' Drosophila — so I'm changing things up a bit, starting today. We talked about vertebrates in a general way, giving an…
pharyngula | March 13, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
Hard to believe, I know, but this class actually hangs together and has a plan. A while back, we talked about the whole cis vs. trans debate, and on Monday we went through another prolonged exercise in epistatic analysis in which the students wondered why we don't just do…
pharyngula | March 11, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
A good portion of what I've been teaching so far uses Drosophila as a model system — it's the baseline for modern molecular genetics. Unfortunately, it's also a really weird animal: highly derived, specialized for rapid, robust development, and as we've learned more about it…
pharyngula | March 6, 2013"TRI-LO-BIIITE!"
Oh, no, that was a terrible opening. You'll only know what the heck I'm talking about if you remember JJ from the television show Good Times, and it's such a pathetic joke it's only going to appeal to grade schoolers. So if you're a time-traveling 8 year old from the 1970s, you'll appreciate the reference. How many of those are reading this right now?
Maybe this will work better. Here's a small chip of shale I keep at my desk.
My son Alaric and I collected that on a trip to Delta, Utah over 20 years ago. We had permission from the owner of a commercial dig site to rummage…
pharyngula | March 4, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
Today we talked about gap genes and a little bit about pair rule genes in flies, and to introduce the topic I summarized genetic epistasis. Epistasis is a fancy word for the interactions between genes, and we've already discussed it on the simplest level. You can imagine…
pharyngula | February 27, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
My students get a full exposure to the Sean Carroll perspective in his book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and I'm generally pro-evo devo throughout my course. I do try to make them aware of the bigger picture, though, so today we had an in-class discussion/'debate' (nothing…
pharyngula | February 25, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
You know I teach the 8am courses every term, right? Every semester for years I get my oddball classes that weren't present in the curriculum 13 years ago (when I started here) stuffed into the cracks of the schedule. I'm slowly getting to be a little pushier and am gradually…
pharyngula | February 18, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
Today was the due date for the take-home exam, which meant everything started a bit late — apparently there was a flurry of last-minute printing and so students straggled in. But we at last had a quorum and I threw worms and maggots at them.
The lab today involves starting…
pharyngula | February 15, 2013Nothing at all! I gave the students an exam instead! While I got a plane and left ice-bound Morris to fly to Fort Lauderdale, Florida! Bwahahahahahaha!
Sometimes it is so good to be the professor. And if ever you wonder why my students hate me with a seething hot anger, it's because I'm such an evil bastard.
Here's what they have to answer.
Developmental Biology Exam #1
This is a take-home exam. You are free and even encouraged to discuss these questions with your fellow students, but please write your answers independently -- I want to hear your voice in your essays. Also note that you are…
pharyngula | February 14, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
On Wednesdays, I try to break away from the lecture format and prompt the students to talk about the science of development. We're working our way through Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and yesterday we talked about chapters 3 and 4.
Chapter 3 has an overview…
pharyngula | February 5, 2013I have a bit of a peeve with a common analogy for the human genome: that it is the blueprint of the body, and that we can find a mapping of genes to details of our morphological organization. It's annoying because even respectable institutions, like the National Human Genome Research Institute, use it as a shortcut in public relations material. And it is so wrong.
There is no blueprint, no map. That's not how the system works. What you actually find in the genome are coding genes that produce proteins, coupled to regulatory elements that switch the coding genes off and on using a kind of…
pharyngula | February 4, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
We began today with chocolate. Always a good thing at 8am, I think — so I brought a candy bar to class. Then I told the students that I loved and respected them all equally and that they all had equal potential, but that I was going to mark just one person as special by…
pharyngula | January 31, 2013Oh gob, the stupidity. The latest wave of anti-choice legislation is based on one trivial premise: it's got a heartbeat! You can't kill it if its heart is beating! So stupid bills have been flitting about in the Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Arkansas, and North Dakota legislatures trying to redefine human life as beginning at the instant that a heartbeat can be detected. Here's Wyoming's story, for instance:
About two weeks ago, state Rep. Kendell Kroeker (R) introduced a measure to supersede the medical definition of viability. Current state law says abortions are prohibited after a fetus has…
pharyngula | January 30, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
You really can't teach a class by lecturing at them…especially not an 8am class. But sometimes there is just such a dense amount of information that I have to get across before the students know what to ask that I have to just tell them some answers. My compromise to deal…