When I'm lecturing about animal diversity and the origins of the multicellular animals (aka metazoans), I point out the similarity between the single-celled protozoans called choanoflagellates and the choanocytes (or 'feeding cells') of sponges. The textbook interpretation is that choanoflagellates may have shared a common ancestor with metazoans, and there's an increasing amount of genetic […]
Continue readingCategory: genetics
scientifique kiwis
Gosh, we had a good Cafe Scientifique this week. My friend & colleague, Dave Lambert, was there to talk about his latest project – sequencing the kiwi genome. (That's kiwi bird, not kiwi people.) And he wants to get you involved!
Continue readingforensic genetics & an evolutionary puzzle
At the moment I'm lecturing to our first-year biology class about plants. In my lecture about algae, there were a couple of slides about malaria. You might well ask 'why'; I know my students were thinking that. Well, I did have a reason – & today I found a brief summary paper (Keeling, 2008) on just […]
Continue readingthe PCR song
I found this on Pharyngula & thought I'd share it – it's a catchy little number & might reinforce a concept or two. (And a little frivolity never hurt anyone!)
Continue readinga worm, but not as we know it
One of the neat things that have come from advances in molecular biology is our ability to use DNA technology to tease out evolutionary relationships – especially those that aren't immediately obvious (such as the subject of an earlier post). Now here's another example – an animal that looks superficially like a worm – but turns out […]
Continue readingprimates’ closest living relatives?
Scientists have thought for a long time that tree shrews are the closest living relatives of primates. More recently, use of DNA data together with morphological comparisons suggested that colugos are also very closely related to apes, monkeys (& us). These so-called 'flying' lemurs use extensive flaps of loose skin, stretched between their outspread front and back […]
Continue readingmore on plant domestication
I remembered, after my last post, that there's an excellent book that puts domestication of plants and animals into a global perspective and asks, among other things, why it was europeans who got into building large overseas empires, not people from other parts of the world. It's Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond (1998), […]
Continue reading“Punk eek” and speciation
The concept of punctuated evolution – bursts of evolutionary novelty separated by long periods of stasis – was first proposed by Stephen Jay Gould & Niles Eldredge in 1972. Since then, there's been an ongoing debate among evolutionary biologists about how significant ‘punk eek' could be in the evolution of new species. (Remember that they aren't […]
Continue readingGene targeting technique wins a Nobel Prize
Just a quick link to an article this time – the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine has been awarded to the scientists who developed the technique of gene targeting. This has allowed scientists to 'knock out' single genes, & by doing this to work out their function. My favourite science blogger, Orac, has just posted […]
Continue readingDiet and your genes
Modern molecular biology has allowed us to look ever more closely into the genetic changes associated with human evolution. A recent research project used this technology to examine a possible relationship between diet and genome.
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