1. transcript
  2. Yeast - The Republicans of the Eukaryotic Kingdom?

Yeast - The Republicans of the Eukaryotic Kingdom?

By apalazzo on October 13, 2006.

Face it, they're unicellular ... they don't like groups (i.e. they are not urbanites). And even when they do grow together in a colony they have no real central control (like a brain) ... in other words they are anti government.

With their cell wall they are clearly isolationist. (I guess they're not neocons!)

They've shed many cellular functions ... such as nuclear envelope break down, microtubule based vesicular transport, centrosomes and most introns ... they are clearly not progressives. Note that these cellular characteristics were retained in more distant relatives of ours and thus it was likely that the common ancestor of yeast-humans also had these features.

Guns? All those antibiotics.

Religious zealots study them (hence all the "awesome power of yeast genetics" chanting).

Gay yeast? They have clearly defined mating types, and those that do not conform are clearly mutants (although I must admit that some yeast do switch mating types naturally).

(Yeah ... it's Friday afternoon and this was stimulated by our happy hour.)

PS It's Friday the 13th! A nice was to end numerology week.
PPS Notice how it went from "quantitation week" to "numbers week" to "numerology week". Down the slippery slope we go!

Addendum: after further consultation, I would modify the Yeast = Republican to Yeast = certain type of Republican. If yeast were human they would be gun slinging Republicans from the Texas panhandle who make their own moonshine and vote for Pat Buchanan.

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"We have reason to believe that the E. coli have antibodies of mass destruction....."

"Gay yeast?"

I have to tell a story of a particularly conservative classmate of mine in grad school. He had multiple copies of Darwin's Black Box (I refuse to link to the tripe) that he'd use to try and convert people. So this young man informed us during a cell bio study session that maybe people could learn from yeast, the whole "a" and "alpha" thing I guess. So he instantly became known as Shmoo, to the point that I forgot his real name and had to ask someone at graduation a few years later.