evolgen

This is the final post ever at evolgen. It was a fun 4+ years, the last three spent at ScienceBlogs, but it has come time for me to close up shop. When I first got into blogging, I did it as a way to share what was on my mind to the few people who would read what I had to say (usually in topics…

Mendel's Garden is the original genetics blog carnival. The next edition will be hosted by Jeremy at Another Blasted Weblog. If you would like to submit a blog post to be included in the carnival, send an email to Jeremy (jcherfas at mac dot com). The carnival should be posted within the next few…

John Hawks points out that Eric Lander has been appointed to co-chair Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology along with science adviser John Holdren and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. Here's how the AP article describes Lander: Lander, who teaches at both MIT and Harvard, founded the…

A couple of years ago, there was talk in the bioblogosphere about getting the general public interested in bioinformatics and molecular evolution: Amateur bioinformatics? Lowering the Ivory Tower with Molecular Evolution Molecular Evolution for the Masses The idea was inspired by the findings of…

Larry Moran points to a couple of posts critical of microarrays (The Problem with Microarrays): Why microarray study conclusions are so often wrong Three reasons to distrust microarray results Microarrays are small chips that are covered with short stretches of single stranded DNA. People…

Over at Wilkins' cabana, there's a post (Some new work on speciation and species) on a paper by Nitin Phadnis and Allen Orr (doi:10.1126/science.1163934). Phadnis and Orr isolated a gene responsible for both reproductive isolation and sex-ratio distortion between two populations of Drosophila…

The 26th edition of Mendel's Garden will be hosted by A Free Man on December 7. If you have written a blog post about any topics in Genetics in the past month or so, send a link to Chris (chris[at]afreeman[dot]org) to be included in the carnival. We're also looking for hosts for upcoming editions…

Back in the day, you could sequence a genome and get a Nature paper out of it. Pretty soon, the sexiness of genome sequencing wore off, and it took a bit more to get into a vanity journal. You had to sequence something cute and cuddly, something extinct, or a lot of genomes at once. Any other…

Population biologists often want to infer the demographic history of the species they study. This includes identifying population subdivision, expansion, and bottlenecks. Genetic data sampled from multiple individuals can often be applied to study population structure. When phylogenetic methods…

You would think that geneticists would have a good definition of "gene". After all, genes are what we study. In introductory biology courses, you may have been introduced to the concept of the gene as the unit of heredity. That's all well and good, but when you begin to study genes at a molecular…

If you hold on until the end of the post, you'll see that it's got science content. But you'll have to wait until the end. First, here's how it starts. I had an optometrist appointment at 8am this morning. I could have voted prior to the appointment, but the polling place is in between the…

After a few months off, here's the return of Mendel's Garden. Blast from the past: rENNISance woman gives us a post on viral genetics. Figuring out DNA looping with unbelievably advanced technology: Greg Laden reviews a paper on the structure of nucleic acids. In the fly, delayed reproduction…

I will be hosting the next edition of Mendel's Garden on Sunday, November 2. If you have written any blog posts about genetics in the past few months, send me a link (evolgen[at]yahoo[dot]com). Also, if you've seen any good genetics posts on other people's blogs, let me know. For those not in the…

In the recent kerfuffle over Sarah Palin's disparaging remarks about "fruit fly" research, an important point was missed by the general public, scientists, and even Drosophila geneticists: she wasn't talking about Drosophila. Now, this point has been clarified by a few people (notably Mike the Mad…

The Penn State Alumni Association has produced trading cards featuring the best and the brightest of the university's faculty (Pa. trading cards highlight brains, not brawn). The cards are only available at University President Graham Spanier's tailgate parties on home football weekends. The…

Inspired by the Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart, here's the Seminar Answer Flow Chart:

One of the hot topics in evolutionary biology concerns the relative contributions of protein coding sequence changes and non-coding changes that lead to differences in the expression of protein coding genes. A subset of this debate can be summarized as cis versus trans. Non-coding sequences that…

I will be hosting Mendel's Garden #25 at evolgen. That's right: the carnival is back! Mendel's Garden is the original blog carnival devoted to genetics. Submit your genetics related posts to evolgen[at]yahoo[dot]com. Because Mendel's Garden has been dormant for the past few months, I'll be…

The human genome (like all mammalian genomes) is loaded with sequences that don't perform any known function. And many of these sequences are junk. And it's not just mammals -- many animal genomes are loaded with junk, as are those of other eukaryotes. That's not to say that some of the sequences…

Every year, the best science blog posts are collected in a book, the Open Laboratory (here are the 2006 and 2007 editions). Last year's edition included my cartoon, The Lab Fridge. It wasn't my best post of the year, but it filled one of the niche categories published in the book. Bora has been…

I'm currently working my way through John Wakeley's book on Coalescent Theory. (The website has a few pre-publication chapters if you want to take a peek.) In his introductory chapter, Wakeley introduces the concept of gene genealogies. He's careful to point out that, unlike the phylogenies we…

About a month ago, we were told that theory is dead. That was the thesis of Chris Anderson's article in Wired. Rather than testing hypotheses using the scientific method, Anderson argues that scientists are merely generating loads of data and looking for correlations and stuff. The article was a…

The University of Iowa is hosting next year's meeting of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, SMBE 2009. I usually go to the annual SMBE conference, and I was probably going to attend SMBE 2009. Now I'm definitely going. Why? Because John Logsdon just announced that they'll be hosting a…

So, I'm just hanging out here by the side of the water waiting for my lunch. Sure, I could go in the water and get my lunch. But that's not how I roll. I wait patiently for my prey to get within striking distance, and then I attack. So, here I am just hanging out by the side of the water. Click to…

Last month I mentioned that I had been in Barcelona at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution conference. I arrived in Spain early in the morning, and, after I got checked in to my hotel, I went with a couple friends to the Barcelona Zoo. This zoo is famous for housing Snowflake, the…

Randy Olson left a career as a marine biologist (Titleist!) to become a film maker. His first feature project was Flock of Dodos, a movie I enjoyed. His second film is Sizzle, a movie reviewed by lots of ScienceBloggers a couple weeks ago. The gist: a lot of ScienceBloggers didn't like sizzle.…

All good medicine is evidence based -- that is, diagnoses and treatments are developed via the scientific method. Oftentimes, evolutionary biology is employed to understand human health and diseases. This is known as evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine is a growing field that takes an…

We all know that Drosophila are the gayest bunch of gays that ever gayed up genetics. This is especially true when you create mutations in fruitless (nee fruity), "the gay gene". Male flies with mutations in fruitless will try to get it on with other males (e.g., doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81802-4…

Phylogeny Friday -- 18 July 2008 When they published the initial analysis of the complete platypus genome (doi:10.1038/nature06936), Nature, as they're wont to do, also put out a news item announcing the major findings (doi:10.1038/453138a). That news article included a phylogeny illustrating the…

Until yesterday, there was a span of about two weeks in which this blog laid dormant. I did that on purpose because I didn't want to give you all the blogging you crave. All three of you who may crave my blogging. And I'm guessing not one of those three even noticed the silence. Ah, the joys of…