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 related to evolution and genetics, but not always). It was a fun hobby, and my blog gave me a public venue to talk about articles I was reading, concepts that I found interesting, and summarize important areas of research. However, the blog has begun to feel more like a burden. I no longer post because…

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 days, so get your submissions in ASAP. Also, hosts are needed for future editions of Mendel's Garden. If you would like to host, please send me an email (evolgen at yahoo dot com). A new edition is usually posted around the first Sunday of each month.

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 Whitehead Institute-MIT Center for Genome Research in 1990, which became part of the Broad Institute in 2003. A leading researcher in the Human Genome Project, he and his colleagues are using the findings to explore the molecular mechanisms behind human disease. Wait, Eric Lander teaches? Really?…

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 armchair astronomers -- people who have no professional training, but make contributions to astronomy via their stargazing hobbies. With so much data available in publicly accessible databases, there's no reason we can't motivate armchair biologists to start mining for interesting results. But how…

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 hybridize DNA from some source to the microarray, which lights up if the DNA hybridizes to the probes on the array. Most biologists are familiar with microarrays being used to measure gene expression. In this case, transcribed DNA is hybridized to the array, and the intensity of the signal is used as a…

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 pseudoobscura. Wilkins doesn't like speciation genes, and he's rails on the concept in his post. What I'm interested in are the comments on Wilkins' post -- primarily the confusion over what the speciation gene hunters mean when they talk about different flavors of speciation. Most population geneticists…

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. If you would like to host the original genetics blog carnival, send me an email (evolgen-at-yahoo-dot-com). Every month from February onward is available.

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 genome sequencing projects were relegated to lower tier journals. Now, it appears that even sequencing the genome of charismatic megafauna only gets you a press release. As TR Gregory points out, the sequencing of the Kangaroo genome was announced in such a manner (Science by press release). But check…

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 are used to link evolutionary relationships to geography, the approaches fall under the guise of phylogeography. The past decade has seen the rise in popularity of a particular phylogeographical approach for intra-specific data: nested clade analysis (Templeton et al. 1995; Templeton 2004). Many of…

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 level (i.e., looking at DNA sequences), that definition ceases to be practical. The advent of DNA sequencing led to the concept of the gene as an open reading frame, and the post-genomic era has challenged the very idea of the gene. I've previously discussed the definition of gene (What is a gene?,…

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 optometrist's office and work, so I figured I'd vote after getting my eyes checked. Big mistake. The eye doctor dilated my pupils, which, much to my surprise, made me far-sighted (I'd never had both pupils dilated simultaneously before). I did not realize this until, when checking out of the office, I could…

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 also delays aging: Ouroboros describes research on senescence in Drosophila. Balancer Chromosomes: Larry Moran describes this marked chromosomal inversions (see also Hermann Muller Invented the Balancer Chromosome). The Genetics of Voting: From Bayblab, a post on the heritability of filling the…

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 know, Mendel's Garden is the original genetics blog carnival. On the first Sunday of every month, the carnival plays host to the best genetics blogging of the past month. After a hiatus of a few months, the carnival is back.

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 Biologist), and I think people are starting to get it. But it was remarkable how people automatically assumed she was talking about Drosophila. Okay, maybe it wasn't so remarkable, given that even Drosophila researchers refer to these little insects as "fruit flies". The problem with that…

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 biologists featured include entomologist Jim Tumlinson and molecular evolution pioneer Masatoshi Nei. I haven't been able to find a complete list of all ten faculty members featured, and I don't think that individual images of the ten cards are available online. If anyone can track them down, post a link…

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 regulate gene expression are known as cis regulatory elements (CREs). The protein coding genes that bind to CREs and control the expression of genes act in trans. That's the background,and here are some more details. The poster boy for the importance of CREs is Sean Carroll, who argues that the…

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 accepting posts written from March through October. So, dig through your archives to find something good, and shoot me an email.

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 of unknown function do, in fact, have a function that we have yet to identify. However, much of the junk comes from the remnants of transposable element (parasitic sequences that hop around the genome). That's not the impression you get from the introduction to a review of transposable elements (TEs…

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 soliciting submissions for this year's edition of Open Lab. I've dug through my archives and found a few posts that I think are worthy of submission. Unfortunately, I'm the worst judge of my own writing, so I need some help. I've provided links to the short list of my best blogging of 2008 (up 'til…