Molecular Biology
pharyngula | February 27, 2006Bone is a sophisticated substance, much more than just a rock-like mineral in an interesting shape. It's a living tissue, invested with cells dedicated to continually remodeling the mineral matrix. That matrix is also an intricate material, threaded with fibers of a protein, type II collagen, that give it a much greater toughness—it's like fiberglass, a relatively brittle substance given resilience and strength with tough threads woven within it. Bone is also significantly linked to cartilage, both in development and evolution, with earlier forms having a cartilaginous skeleton that is…
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…
pharyngula | February 22, 2006
My daughter is learning about evolution in high school right now, and the problem isn't with the instructor, who is fine, but her peers, who complain that they don't see the connections. She mentioned specifically yesterday that the teacher had shown a cladogram of the relationships between crocodilians, birds, and mammals, and that a number of students insisted that there was no similarity between a bird and an alligator.
I may have to send this news article to school with her: investigators have found that a mutation in chickens causes them to develop teeth—and the teeth resemble those of…
pharyngula | February 18, 2006
Once upon a time, I was one of those nerds who hung around Radio Shack and played about with LEDs and resistors and capacitors; I know how to solder and I took my first old 8-bit computer apart and put it back together again with "improvements." In grad school I was in a neuroscience department, so I know about electrodes and ground wires and FETs and amplifiers and stimulators. Here's something else I know: those generic components in this picture don't do much on their own. You can work out the electrical properties of each piece, but a radio or computer or stereo is much, much more than a…
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…
evolgen | February 8, 2006The Scientist has a good review of genome sequencing (coming from a more biomedical perspective). I tend to present genomics from an evolutionary angle (rather than functional). This is a good read if you're not too familiar with the field, and all you know about genomics is what I've told you.
evolgen | February 3, 2006Free Association (the Nature Genetics blog) has published a commentary from Laura Ranum, the senior author on the recent Abraham Lincoln ataxia paper. It begins:
In 1992 I received a phone call from a neurologist with an ataxia patient that had a strong family history of the disease. Impressed upon hearing there were at least eight affected family members, I asked if I could contact the patient directly. After talking to this woman about her family history she paused and said "but you know, you really ought to talk to my mother...I think she knows of some more cousins"; the SCA5 odyssey…
evolgen | February 3, 2006Now that George W. Bush has proclaimed himself the Oil President War President Building Secular Democracies President Anti-Oil Pro-Science President we can all look forward to an increase in funding. Whether or not any of this money will go toward basic research (pretty please) is unclear. If you can find any way to link your research to bioterrorism, cancer, or biomedicine there's quite a bit of money out there to be obtained. If you're just out to increase the knowledge base, you're a dog begging for scraps from the table.
Apparently this increase in funding will come with a few strings…
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…
pharyngula | January 14, 2006BioCurious has a nifty methods article on Labeling λ DNA—if you've ever wanted to know how to tag a strand of DNA with a bead so you can tow it around with your optical tweezers, here's the theory (and they've got optical tweezers? I am so jealous.)
pharyngula | January 12, 2006Every biology student gets introduced to the chordates with a list of their distinctive characteristics: they have a notochord, a dorsal hollow nerve cord, gill slits, and a post-anal tail. The embryonic stage in which we express all of these features is called the pharyngula stage—it's often also the only stage at which we have them. We terrestrial vertebrates seal off those pharyngeal openings as we develop, while sea squirts throw away their brains as an adult.
The chordate phylum has all four of those traits, but there is another extremely interesting phylum that has some of them, the…
pharyngula | January 12, 2006Well. If I were a "single-celled, parasitic protozoan known for infections that sometimes last for years, which may be accompanied by vague gastrointestinal distress or dysentery—complete with blood and mucus in the stool", I'd feel grossly insulted by this comparison.
(I'm one to talk…"pmyers" turns up in a trypanosome.)
pharyngula | January 12, 2006Whoa…now this is a phenomenal tool. iSpecies is a simple, minimalist page ala Google, with a single text entry box. Type in any taxon name, hit enter, and it comes back at you with genomics data, images, and documents on the organism(s). It's a species search engine!
(via Evolgen)