evolgen
Posts by this author
January 5, 2007
In light of the recent post on translational selection, I give you this paper from PLoS Genetics on tissue specific differences in tRNA expression from humans. From the abstract:
We found tissue-specific differences in the expression of individual tRNA species, and tRNAs decoding amino acids with…
January 4, 2007
Jacob appears to be an enemy combatant in the War on ManateesTM. They are attacking the Northeast United States via our inland waterways. Jacob, who lives west of the continental divide, is safe from the attack. Many of us are not so lucky. Quit being such an enabler, Jacob.
evolgen special feature…
January 3, 2007
New Scientist reports on research to identify DNA sequences that cannot be found in any nucleotide database. These sequences are short -- so as to decrease the probability that they are missing due to chance alone -- and the researchers from the Boise State University have identified over 60,000 15…
January 3, 2007
But where is halfway?
The Scientist has published an article by Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, on communicating science to the general public. The basic premise is that scientific literacy must increase, and scientists must perform the outreach in order to increase the science…
January 3, 2007
Pim van Meurs has a blog post at The Panda's Thumb about the recent paper on translational selection on a synonymous polymorphic site in a eukaryotic gene (DOI link). He points out that this was predicted in a paper from 1987. In short, the rate of translation depends on the tRNA pool -- amino…
January 2, 2007
It doesn't make up for the UCLA game, but the overrated, over hyped, team in the highlighter pants fell to the mighty Trojans. Fight on!
The USC bashers are pissed, and the sad Wolverines are moping. But this is par for the course at the school that has perfected losing in Pasadena.
December 31, 2006
Biologists often wear rubber gloves when doing their research to protect them from the nasty chemicals they're working with and to protect their samples from contamination. I've been known to bitch about people not removing those gloves prior to entering common areas -- touching things they shouldn…
December 30, 2006
Endangered 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…
December 29, 2006
The rift in the biological sciences may lie between computational biologists and wet labs, but when we look at individual fields, we see other divisions. In an essay in PLoS Computational Biology Carl Zimmer describes the divide amongst evolutionary biologists. On one side are researchers who like…
December 28, 2006
Why, it seems like just last week that we were kvetching about the ad nominum attacks upon our character -- or, at least, the spelling of our blog's name. The people who add an extra "V" (turning evolgen into evolvgen) are lightweights compared to those who confuse us with Evolution Blog. As of…
December 28, 2006
Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who broke his leg during the Preakness Stakes, is almost healthy enough to be released from his ICU stall at University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center. He has been the focus of hopes and prayers of many horse racing fans -- and little kids who are fans…
December 28, 2006
The editors at Scientific American are afraid of PLoS ONE, but they're more than happy to publish articles about Nature papers. Their coverage of the Komodo dragon virgin births contains the following lead in:
The "immaculate conception" of Komodo dragons at two English zoos might provide one…
December 26, 2006
John Wilkins has replied to Larry Moran on the role of "chance" in evolution (incidentally, Moran replies to Wilkins on the same topic, but a different post by Wilkins). Here's what Larry wrote:
Nobody denies the power of natural selection and nobody claims that natural selection is random or…
December 25, 2006
James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, has passed away at the age of 73 in Atlanta, Georgia. The world is a slightly less funky place today. I've posted some videos -- in honor of the hardest working man in show business -- below the fold.
The early years:
Eddie Murphy as James Brown in "Celebrity…
December 25, 2006
The University of California, Berkeley and Texas A&M University will square off in this year's Holiday Bowl football game on Thursday, December 28. While not quite as complex as last year's national championship game pairing, there is a nice dichotomy when one considers the stereotypes of Cal…
December 25, 2006
Carl Zimmer has an article in the upcoming edition of Scientific American that looks at cancer from the perspective of evolutionary biology. The most obvious parallel is that of cancer cells within an individual modeled as an evolving population:
Rare mutations, for instance, may cause a cell to…
December 24, 2006
As Lynn Margulis elegantly explained, some eukaryotic organelles -- such as mitochondria and chloroplasts -- are the product of an ancient endosymbiosis event. Free living prokaryotes were absorbed by primitive eukaryotes and, over many generations, become entangled in an obligate host-symbiont…
December 23, 2006
Molecular markers are becoming more and more popular for species identification -- a practice known as DNA barcoding. Researchers sequence a region of the genome from an organism of interest and search that sequence against a DNA database using BLAST. Such an analysis is contingent on a…
December 22, 2006
The editors at Scientific American are taking note that the review process at PLoS ONE differs from that of traditional journals:
With the burden of proof off of the reviewers, we in the science press will have to be more vigilant than ever. We can't rush to put stories out until we've focus-…
December 22, 2006
Via the error prone cosmologists I learned about this challenge:
Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that "Everything is made of atoms". What one sentence would you tell the future about your own…
December 22, 2006
Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch are two of the leaders in the movement to keep the science in science classrooms in American public schools. Both Scott and Branch hold administrative position at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), and they've displayed great commitment to maintaining…
December 21, 2006
There's an interesting discussion going on at Pharyngula regarding virgin birth in Bethlehem Komodo dragons. Two captive females in Europe recently gave birth to clutches of eggs despite no to minimal contact with males. The progeny are all homozygous at the each of the seven loci surveyed, with…
December 21, 2006
As we all know, the genetic code is redundant. Within protein coding regions, substitutions at silent sites do not affect the amino acid sequence of the encoded protein. Because of this property, these synonymous substitutions (so-called because they result in the same amino acid) are often used to…
December 21, 2006
The Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open access, web-based publisher, has launched its newest venture, PLoS ONE. PLoS ONE aims to bring scientific publishing into the Web 2.0 era, with a simple interface for commenting on published research articles. This feature is not unique to PLoS ONE, as…
December 20, 2006
It's evolgen. E-V-O-L-G-E-N. Think "evil jen".
One thing our blog is not is "evolvgen". Notice the extra "v". We do, and we don't like it. You may like calendars with nekkid people or studying some insignificant primate. But, whatever you fancy, whatever floats your boat, whatever tickles your…
December 20, 2006
This past summer, Matt Hahn presented a talk at the Society for Molecular Biology Evolution meeting and Evolution 2006 entitled "The 17% Solution: Gene Family Divergence Between Human And Chimpanzee". The basic premise was that, even though humans and chimps are ~99% identical at the DNA sequence…
December 19, 2006
Via this press release I learned about this book: The Top Ten Myths About Evolution. The book deconstructs ten myths that creationists propagate while spreading misinformation. It also gives me an excuse to post cute pictures of furry primates.
The official website lists the ten myths:
1) Survival…
December 19, 2006
John Hawks, along with Gene Expression regular Greg Cochran, has published a paper (PDF) on adaptive introgression in human evolution. In case the jargon is too much, we're talking about the caveman gene. Both Greg and John have blogged the paper. Check out what John says about mtDNA:
However,…
December 18, 2006
Since my last report on Nature's copy number polymorphism (CNP) papers, a couple other journals have published studies of human structural polymorphisms:
Genome Research has two papers on detecting CNPs using oligonucleotide microarrays. The strategy here is to develop a microarray that contains…
December 12, 2006
My call for ecology blogs went better than expected. I expected next to nothing, but I got more than nothing -- at least enough to consider it further away from nothing than next to it. Anyhow, I have compiled a list of blogs below the fold. They are grouped into those that deal with the science of…