evolgen | July 23, 2006Have you ever wondered what's happened to the line between church and state? Are you curious as to whether the line has been blurred or erased altogether? Clay at DeadlyHippos investigates the issue by visiting a megachurch in Tennessee. The church is run by Maury Davis, a man convicted of first degree murder who subsequently found God-uh and was saved-ah. Pastor Davis is also the man behind the DVD Islam: An Evil Religion (A four part series). Oh the sweet, sweet irony. In between pop songs, unraveling of enormous American flags, and fireworks displays, Davis cheers the virtues of…
evolgen | July 22, 2006I just realized that the (relatively) recent ScienceBlogs addition Dynamics of Cats is authored by a faculty member from my university. It only took me two months after he came on board to notice Steinn Sigurðsson's academic affiliation. The two of us, along with Monsieur Bérubé, are representing the school quite well. Additionally, my alma mater has a few bio-bloggers. Sadly, there is also a growing movement of anti-science on the hill.
How is the blogging scene at your University? If you aren't an academic, how's the blogging scene in your town or community?
evolgen | July 21, 2006Or maybe his copy editor reads this blog. Either way, there are changes afoot at the NY Times.
Three days ago I ragged on NY Times science reporter Nicholas Wade for using the word 'decode' when describing genome sequencing. In his latest article he has improved. Last time he wrote about cheap whole genome sequencing; this time he has written about sequencing of a Neanderthal nuclear genome. Now, Wade hasn't entirely kicked the decoding habit:
The project is a collaboration between Dr. Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and 454 Life…
evolgen | July 21, 2006The third edition of Mendel's Garden -- the genetics blog carnival -- has been posted at Viva la Evolucion. Nothing like a blog with a Spanish language flavor hosted by an Irish website. Check out los artÃculos de genética.
evolgen | July 20, 2006If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?
That's what they are asking us this week. And, once again, I'm going to skirt the question. You see, it depends on whether the future counts as a "place throughout history." Currently, the future is not history, but it will be history once the future becomes the past. You'll probably need a few minutes to digest that, as I must have just blown your mind. Or not.
My chosen place in time (yeah, I abandoned the whole history thing): the day of the $1000 genome. This is the population…
evolgen | July 20, 2006
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI, sorry no clever acronym) has announced the next primate genome to be sequenced: the white cheeked gibbon (pictured right). This genome is of particular interest due to the large amount of segmental duplications, which are of both medical and evolutionary interest. Here is Francis Collins, the NHGRI Director, pimping the project:
"The gibbon genome sequence will provide researchers with crucial information when comparing it to the human genome sequence and other primate genomes, shedding light on molecular mechanisms implicated in human…
evolgen | July 20, 2006A few months ago I promised that I would publish some original research on this blog. I managed to churn out some background, but I still haven't gotten around to presenting any results. Even though I wasn't able to get my original research out, it doesn't mean that no one is publishing research on Drosophila on blogs. MissPrism has performed a somewhat scientific study of condiment preference in Drosophilids. Her conclusion: they prefer vinegar to sweet things. I guess that's why they call them vinegar flies.
evolgen | July 19, 2006The 58th edition of Tangled Bank has been posted at Salto sobrius. Go read some stuff people have written about science.
evolgen | July 18, 2006The NY Times has chimed in on cheap DNA sequencing with this article from Nicholas Wade. Wade's article deals with medical applications of affordable whole genome sequencing technologies (with the goal being the $1000 genome). The article, however, is cringe-inducing because Wade has decided that 'sequencing' and 'decoding' are synonyms (I hate it when people do that). Only yesterday did I bitch about science reporters butchering terminology, and Wade goes out and gives me multiple quotes in which he refers to genome sequencing as decoding a genome. Here's a passage that would be readable if…
evolgen | July 18, 2006Jacob at Salamander Candy has written the post that I have been meaning to write. With so much freely available sequence data in GenBank and loads of free software with which to analyze it, we should encourage the general public to start looking for 'interesting things' (building phylogenies, comparing rates of evolution along lineages, testing for natural selection, etc). There are tons of armchair astronomers, so why not develop a community of armchair molecular genetics data miners? Here's a taste of Jacob's essay:
The more non-professionals we have doing science, the better, because not…
evolgen | July 18, 2006Joe Morgan is a Hall of Fame baseball player and a former member of the Cincinnati's Big Red Machine. He is also a commentator for ESPN and a strong opponent of all the new fangled baseball statistics. Anyone who has listened to an ESPN broadcast of Major League Baseball has heard Morgan criticize the Moneyball style of managing baseball teams. There are some interesting parallels between Little Joe's position on baseball statistics and creationists' dissent from science.
Ideally, baseball statistics should objectively measure the performance of individual players. Traditional baseball…
evolgen | July 17, 2006Click here to send an e-mail to your Senator telling him or her to support biomedical research by voting YES on H.R. 810.
evolgen | July 17, 2006Besides coming up with catchy titles or getting the facts, terminology and statistics wrong? Apparently obtaining crappy Excel graphs is pretty tough according to a survey of science reporters. Am I too hard on science reporters? There are some really good ones (this one comes to mind), but there are also some really poorly written science articles. I'm not talking about the actual writing, but the scientific content. Anyway, go read this article about science reporters, deceptive PI's, and confusing science. Because, as Barbie so famously said, "Science is hard."
(Via Nobel Intent.)
evolgen | July 17, 2006Last September, Bruce Lahn and colleagues published a couple of papers on the evolution of two genes responsible for brain development in humans (ASPM and Microcephalin). A group led by Sally Otto published a criticism of the analysis performed by Lahn's group in last week's issue of Science (JP has written a good summary on GNXP). Lahn and colleagues issued an excellent response to that criticism.
The original papers on ASPM and Microcephalin argued that the patterns of polymorphism and linkage disequilibrium at the two loci were inconsistent with our current understanding of demographic…
evolgen | July 17, 2006I haven't posted any comic strips in over a month, so I figured I was due for one. This one comes from the poorly drawn, but always insightful, Toothpaste for Dinner:
evolgen | July 16, 2006Via Genetics and Health comes this cartoon movie of DNA replication. If you've never taken a molecular genetics course, this may be new to you.
evolgen | July 16, 2006Here is some light reading for your Sunday:
Mosquitoes sing to each other by flapping their wings. This paper reports sexually dimorphic responses to wing beat patterns in mosquitoes (PZ Myers has a good review). This leads me to wonder whether we can study intra- and inter-specific differences in flight behavior and response, which then gets me wondering whether we can find QTLs responsible for these differences. And (this should come as no surprise to those who know me) I also wonder whether these QTLs will map to within inversions for sympatric species pairs more so that allopatric…
evolgen | July 13, 2006At one point in my life, I wanted to study conservation genetics. Now, I just make fun of molecular ecologists and their flawed data. The most recent installment of Ask A ScienceBlogger takes me back to the days before I discovered the wonders of genomics:
Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?
Before I answer the question (or avoid answering the question) allow me to say a couple of things. First of all, this question would be much easier if it were rephrased, "Should we target any particular species for extinction?" If that were the question, my…
evolgen | July 13, 2006The Scientist is linking to an imaginary1 article from PNAS in which researchers compare the cost of sequencing microbial (I'm guessing they mean bacteria) genomes using the traditional Sanger method and the hot new technology developed by 454. Not so surprisingly, they find that a hybrid method -- ~5x coverage with Sanger followed by a couple rounds of 454 -- is the most cost effective strategy. I say it's not surprising because usually some intermediate solution wins out in science.
The Sanger method is nice because you get paired end reads from clones, which are very helpful in assembling…
evolgen | July 12, 2006The genome encodes all of the RNAs and contains sequences responsible for the transcription of those RNAs and the proper folding and wrapping of the cromosomes. The RNAs encoded by the genome are collectively known as the transcriptome. The transcripts that are translated into proteins represent the proteome or the ORFeome (depending on the context).
I'm fascinated by the growing list of "-omes" out there. Genomics and proteomics appear to be the most established "-omics" disciplines, but a new paper in PNAS has introduced me to an "-ome" with which I was previously not familiar: the…