A couple of years ago I sat in on a colleague’s botany lectures & was enchanted to hear about a green sea slug – green, because it eats algae & sequesters the algal chloroplasts within its own cells. A solar-powered sea slug!
Continue readingCategory: genetics
sequencing the neadertal genome
A few days ago now there was a splash of excitement in the newspapers: a research team had announced that they’d sequenced the Neandertal genome. (They didn’t use exclamation marks but you could imagine them there.) I thought at the time that it sounded interesting, but it was a bit unusual that the announcement preceded […]
Continue readingan excess of warts
Like many young women her age, my daughter recently received information about Gardasil, a vaccine that offers protection against some types of the human papilloma virus (HPV). HPV is a virus that infects the skin & mucous membranes. It comes in more than 100 forms, some of which cause things like warts (including genital warts). Others […]
Continue readingethics & pre-implantation genetic diagnosis
A question in the 2007 Scholarship exam asked you to discuss the impact of various forms of genetic testing on the human gene pool. One of those techniques was pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PIGD: testing very early embryos for the genetic markers linked to a variety of conditions (or, where known, for the genes themselves). Now […]
Continue readingwaterflea helmets – lamarckian, or epigenetic?
Water fleas – Daphnia – are rather cute little freshwater arthropods: In some circumstances (water temperature, presence of predators), rather than having that sharp little point on their heads (top of the picture, above the eyespot) some Daphnia will have a longer, spikier ‘helmet’. And this is where it gets interesting: it depends on the mother. If a […]
Continue readingconvergence in tomatoes &… a retrovirus
ERV is on a roll this week. She’s just put up this fascinating post about convergent evolution – at the level of enzymes – in tomatoes and (wait for it) the retrovirus HIV. I read it & thought, whoa! this is amazing! But this is ERV’s field of expertise – go over there & read it; […]
Continue readingcomplete neanderthal mtDNA sequenced
Grump grumpity grump – a headline like that & we don’t have full access to the journal (only up to a year ago)…. But anyway – on The Panda’s Thumb there’s a report of a research project which has achieved the full Neandertal mitochondrial DNA sequence. TPT quotes a conclusion from the summary of the paper: […]
Continue readingan early birthday surprise
Say ‘Charles Darwin’ and (after ‘evolution’!) many people would probably say ‘Galapagos’. The tortoises, mockingbirds, finches & iguanas that he observed and collected on the Galapagos Islands contributed to his development of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Darwin noted that there were two species of iguana on the islands – the […]
Continue readinghow to s*x a moa
Time for look at another paper. This one’s on something I think I referred to earlier – the use of ancient DNA to determine the sex of New Zealand’s giant, flightless – & alas! extinct – moa.
Continue readingevolution of the eye
I’ve written before about the evolution of the eye (here & here for example. Now there’s a whole issue of the most excellent science education journal Evolution: education & outreach devoted to this very topic – & it’s free on-line right here! So if you’re interested in following up on some of the latest work on this […]
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