Drosophila
evolgen | March 13, 2007This post is part of a series documenting Professor Steve Steve's recent visit to Philadelphia for the Drosophila Research Conference (aka, the Fly Meeting).
After tracking down Steve Steve in the lobby of the hotel on Saturday, we picked up some food at the Reading Terminal Market -- a permanent sort-of-farmers-market next to the Philly Convention Center. The place was pretty packed, due in part to the Flower Show going on next door. Steve Steve was a little bummed that he didn't have time to check out any of the garden displays -- being an amateur horticulturalist and developer of the…
evolgen | March 12, 2007
What a weekend! Professor Steve Steve and I returned from Philadelphia on Sunday after hanging out with the Drosophilists. Steve arrived in Philly on Thursday morning on a direct flight from Iowa City, but the staff at the Philadelphia Marriott couldn't understand his thick accent when he asked that they notify me of his arrival. The little guy wandered the lobby of the hotel until Saturday morning, when I found him nibbling on the flamboyant floral display. That wasn't the only thing the Marriott screwed up.
More stories and pictures can be found below the fold.
Why the Marriott sucks:…
evolgen | March 6, 2007Alex claims I do cowboy science because my protocol for DNA isolation requires cutting plastic with hot razor blades. But before we ever get to cut any plastic, we need to grind up the flies. I don't have any pretty pictures of this process, but I can capture the essence in words (picture may come later). It starts with "homogenizing" about two grams of flies in a few milliliters of buffer. We end up with a Drosophila shake -- kind of like a milk shake, only without milk and you probably don't want to drink it -- which has a bunch of particulate matter (pieces of exoskeleton, wings, legs,…
evolgen | March 4, 2007The word on the streets is that there used to be a blog at this URL (pronounced like the mountain range separating Europe from Asia). If this were a blog, however, it would be updated often and definitely not left dormant for over two weeks. All I can say is that meth is a hell of a drug. But fear not readers, I have reemerged from a research induced vanishing act, and I'll be blogging with some vigor for the near future (the specific amount of vigor cannot be guaranteed or measured with anything resembling an acceptable level of accuracy). In fact, I've got a long post -- filled with all the…
evolgen | December 30, 2006Endangered Ugly Things has a post on the eleven Drosophila species listed as endangered and the one listed as threatened in 2006. These flies are known as picture winged for the patterns found on their wings. (The obligatory pictures can be found below the fold.) I'm especially happy that these flies are listed as "pomace flies" on the NatureServe website (search for "Drosophila"), and I bet Mel Green is as well. But what are these beautiful creatures doing on a blog called Endangered Ugly Things?
I found this website with more information on Hawaiian Drosophila.
Drosophila heteronuera, one…
evolgen | December 5, 2006A few weeks ago PNAS published a paper on the evolution of snake sex chromosomes. The authors compare snake sex chromosome evolution with that of mammals and birds. Given my passing interest in sex chromosome evolution, I decided to check it out.
Snakes use sex chromosomes to determine the sex of their progeny. Sex in other reptiles, such as crocodiles, is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated. There are two main types of sex chromosome systems in vertebrates: XY and ZW. Most mammals, some fish, some reptiles, and some amphibians use the XY system -- males are…
evolgen | November 21, 2006John Hawks reports that the gene that, when mutated, can turn male flies gay and females into lesbians can also make boy flies fight like girls and vice-versa. This research will be published in an upcoming edition of Nature Neuroscience. And be sure to check out the videos from the fruit fly Drosophila Fight Club.
evolgen | November 7, 2006That's right: if you study human genetics, you suck. In relation to Drosophila geneticists, of course. You see, human geneticists are boring. Drosophila geneticists come up with clever names for genes. When the homologues are identified in humans, the names are deemed offensive and inappropriate. Apparently, patients don't like being told they have a mutation in the lunatic fringe gene. Or sonic hedgehog. Or mothers against decapentaplegia. This is according to an article in Nature.
Maybe I don't know jack about bedside manner, but I can appreciate the amount of thought that goes into naming…
evolgen | November 2, 2006A couple of days ago I showed you pictures of where we can find Drosophila in the Southwestern United States. Today, I'll show you some pictures of those flies. Below the fold are flies with racing stripes and others with fancy colored testicles. That's right: fly balls only a click away. You know you want it.
Before we get to the red and yellow testicles, I've got some striped flies to show you. Now, these guys aren't Drosophila, but they are members of a closely related genus. Well, closely related as far as insects go. The two genera diverged at least 50 million years ago. Here is a dorsal…
evolgen | October 31, 2006As promised, I'll be posting some pictures of flies we caught in and around Tucson, Arizona. But before we can talk about the flies, we need to talk about the local flora. The host plants for these flies serve as a restaurant, discotheque, bedroom, and nursery. In Arizona, those plants tend to be cacti. Below the fold I have posted a picture of a cactus that met a sad fate: it was struck by a bold of lightning. But from the ashes of the dead saguaro came a diverse collection of Drosophilids.
Drosophila are NOT true fruit flies (see here), and they prefer rotting plants to fresh fruit. For…
evolgen | October 25, 2006
At the same time this post is scheduled to go up on ScienceBlogs I should be a few thousand feet above Middle America. I'll be spending the rest of this week in Tucson, Arizona (which I like to pronounce "Tuck-Sun", like how we pronounce Phoenix "Pa-Ho-Nix") learning about Drosophila. Sure, I already know a bit about these pomace flies, but after this weekend I'll have mad Drosophila skills. They should provide an excellent complement to my chicken-head-eating skills.
This is my way of saying posting will be light -- kinda like the weight I push -- over the next few days.
evolgen | October 12, 2006One of the greatest developments of the post-genomic era has been the refinement of the concept of the 'gene'. The central dogma states that genes encode RNA transcripts which are translated into the amino acid sequence that makes up a protein. But protein coding genes make up a small fraction of many genomes, so what does the rest of the genome do? Some say it's junk. Others say that it's involved in regulating the transcription of the other regions. And even others say that it's transcribed, but not translated. (Note: most think it's some combination of the three.)
We're now discovering…
evolgen | October 6, 2006Any department at a university will have tons of bureaucratic procedures one must complete in order to do anything from hang a message board in the hallway to purchase an expensive piece of equipment. My department is no different, although the bureaucracy is tolerable. That doesn't mean there aren't times when you need to thumb your nose at the whole system. For instance, when requesting that a purchase be paid for by grant money, we are required to provide both a description of the product purchased and the purpose of the product. Sometimes the description pretty much sums up the purpose.…
evolgen | September 18, 2006After spending the last couple of years in front of a computer or in the fly room, I finally returned to the wet lab last week. The occasion: DNA isolation. Now, this isn't any ole' DNA isolation protocol. That would be too easy. Instead, I need some high molecular weight DNA, which means it takes a few days from start to finish with lots of centrifugation throughout.
Because I need lots of high quality DNA, I need a fair bit of tissue. This wouldn't be much of a problem if I were working with an organism with a substantial body mass. Alas, I work with Drosophila, and they're tiny. That means…
evolgen | September 8, 2006And 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…
evolgen | September 5, 2006As I was working on my computer (in my office) this afternoon, a small critter was flying around my head. Based on my current location (in a building housing at least 3 Drosophila labs) and my previous whereabouts (our lab's fly room), I surmised that this was most likely a member of genus Drosophila. My suspicions were confirmed when, at 7:45pm (about 3 hours after I first noticed the pest), she (I think it was a she from the quick glance I got) landed on my computer monitor. Upon closer inspection (although not long enough to adequately surmise the sex) I noticed the fly was too lightly…
evolgen | July 20, 2006A few months ago I promised that I would publish some original research on this blog. I managed to churn out some background, but I still haven't gotten around to presenting any results. Even though I wasn't able to get my original research out, it doesn't mean that no one is publishing research on Drosophila on blogs. MissPrism has performed a somewhat scientific study of condiment preference in Drosophilids. Her conclusion: they prefer vinegar to sweet things. I guess that's why they call them vinegar flies.
evolgen | June 18, 2006Alan Packer at Free Association, the Nature Genetics blog, reports that Kossack Wesley Clark was once a fly pusher. During the Cold War (aka, before my time), gifted students were taught genetics in an accelerated course. They got to perform experiments using irradiated Drosophila melanogaster. As a stickler for details, I've got a couple errors to point out in the General's story:
And so, in the Federal Radiation Project, they talked to us and they taught us about genetics with the, the species was Drosophila melanogaster, which is the common fruit fly.
I feel like a broken record, but…
evolgen | June 14, 2006Another review of Michael Ashburner's book Won for All is available on PLoS Biology. PZ Myers also wrote a review of the book, and the two pieces complement each other nicely.
evolgen | May 19, 2006As I mentioned previously, I'm busy preparing some data for a meeting next week. I don't have much time to devote to Phylogeny Friday, so I'll be sharing some of my own data with you. This data is nothing special; it just happens to be the data I finished analyzing a few minutes ago. It's open, I could build a tree, and I'll show you that tree below the fold.
This tree contains a scant three sequences. The two closely related sequences both come from Drosophila pseudoobscura and the outgroup is a gene from D. melanogaster. This gene was duplicated along the D. pseudoobscura lineage. In the…