Saturday, October 22, 2011
Friday, October 21, 2011
Wanted - papers on the origin of meiosis and diploidy
One of the students in the Intro Bio course I am teaching at UC Davis is interested in papers on the origin of meiosis and/or the origin of diploidy. Some papers I have pulled up so far include:
- A Phylogenomic Inventory of Meiotic Genes:: Evidence for Sex in Giardia and an Early Eukaryotic Origin of Meiosis
- Origins of the machinery of recombination and sex
- Using a meiosis detection toolkit to investigate ancient asexual "scandals" and the evolution of sex.
- Primitive forms of meiosis: the possible evolution of meiosis.
- Recombination and the evolution of diploidy.
- Transition from haploidy to diploidy.
- Self-fertilization and the evolution of recombination.
- Haploidy or diploidy: which is better?
- Somatic mutation favors the evolution of diploidy.
Suggestions for others would be welcome.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
The ascendancy of microbiology: #UCDavis and the Institute of Medicine as examples
Just another few lines of evidence of the ascendancy of microbiology to report.
#1 - At UC Davis Microbiology is very big and getting bigger.
Consider this. The Dean of the School of Medicine, Claire Pomeroy is an infectious disease expect and microbiologist.
The new Dean of the College of Biological Sciences, James Hildreth research focuses on HIV.
The new Dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine Michael Lairmore specializes in HTLVs (human T-lymphotropic viruses).
Microbes seem to be literally taking over the place here ...
#2 The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has been picking more and more microbiologists.
Already there are many microbiologists in the Institute of Medicine. Not surprising of course as microbiology is a major area of medical research. (I note, two of the three people I listed above - Hildreth and Larimore and in the IOM).
And now today the IOM announced newly elected members. IOM Elects 65 New Members, Five Foreign Associates - Institute of Medicine. And a quick glance IDs many many microbiologists - I think the fraction is going up. Among the new members:
Claire Pomeroy, from UC Davis (see above).
Claire Fraser-Liggett, of U. of Maryland. I note I used to work at a place, TIGR, some of you may have heard of back in the day. This place was run by Claire F-L. Now I work at a place where some parts (I have a 50% appointment in the medical school) are run by Claire P. Seems I have a thing for working at places with microbiologists name Claire in positions of power.
David Relman, microbiomologist from Stanford.
Martin Blaser, another microbiomologist.
Patricia Conrad, parasitologist/microbiologist at UC Davis.
Paul Offit, immunologist.
And others. I know - I am of course biased. But everywhere I look, from the science section(s) of the New York Times, to articles and news and stories all around, microbes seem to be creeping in more and more. And that is a good thing.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Blast from the past - Ernst Mayr and Luca Cavalli-Sforza talking at Stanford
Friday, October 07, 2011
The story behind Pseudomonas syringae comparative genomics / pathogenicity paper; guest post by David Baltrus (@surt_lab)
More fun from the community. Today I am very happy to have another guest post in my "Story behind the paper" series. This one comes to us from David Baltrus, an Assistant Professor at University of Arizona. For more on David see his lab page here and his twitter feed here. David has a very nice post here about a paper on the "Dynamic evolution of pathogenicity revealed by sequencing and comparative genomics of 19 Pseudomonas syringae isolates" which was published in PLoS Pathogens in July. There is some fun/interesting stuff in the paper, including analysis of the "core" and "pan" genome of this species. Anyway - David saw my request for posts and I am very happy that he responded. Without further ado - here is his story (I note - I added a few links and Italics but otherwise he wrote the whole thing ...).
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I first want to than Jonathan for giving me this opportunity. I am a big fan of “behind the science” stories, a habit I fed in grad school by reading every Perspectives (from the journal Genetics) article that I could get a hold of. Science can be rough, but I remember finding solace in stories about the false starts and triumphs of other researchers and how randomness and luck manage to figure into any discovery. If anything I hope to use this space to document this as it is fresh in my mind so that (inevitably) when the bad science days roll around I can have something to look back on. In the very least, I'm looking forward to mining this space in the future for quotes to prove just how little I truly understood about my research topics in 2011. It took a village to get this paper published, so apologies in advance to those that I fail to mention. Also want to mention this upfront, Marc Nishimura is my co-author and had a hand in every single aspect of this paper.
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
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