Way back in 2004, the first of the ‘new’ Scholarship exams asked students to: Compare and contrast the ecological and evolutionary outcomes of releasing herbicide tolerant and insect resistant GM plants. It’s an interesting question. I suspect that a lot of the answers would have focused on the potential negative environmental effects of releasing these GM […]
Continue readingTag: genetics
the importance of genetic variation
ERV has just put up an excellent post on why genetic diversity is important. She starts off: Okay, so there are like 20,000 polar bears left. 4,000 tigers. 1,600 Pandas. Meh, who cares, right? I mean, there are still some. 1,600 plus the ones in zoos. ‘Endangered’ animals are fine! Yeah… No. Minor problem with […]
Continue readingthe ambiguity of pseudogenes
I said the other day that there’s always something new to learn, & I love that my job gives me lots of opportunities to do this. Here’s a case in point. In my second-year paper on evolution, I talk a little bit about pseudogenes. I’m not actually a geneticist & so for this part of […]
Continue readingblack robins & tomtit hybridisation
The black robin (Petroica traversi) is one of the world’s most endangered birds – there are only around 250 or so in existence. But it’s also one of the success stories of NZ’s conservation efforts – brought back from the brink of extinction. However, this has come at a genetic cost to these little black […]
Continue readinggenetic underpinnings of thumbs
I’ve just had a quick look at a paper on the likely role of genetic enhancers in the development of human thumbs. Not exactly rocket science has already done an excellent job of commenting on it, so this is really just a heads-up – go over there to read the whole thing. The paper reports on […]
Continue readingmedicine & individual genotype
ERV has just posted an interesting item on the interplay between medicine, genotype, and perceived racial differences. There’s a family of genes (CYP450) that produces the cytochrome enzymes involved in drug metabolism. Depending on an individual’s particular set of alleles, they may not be able to metabolise a given drug, or might metabolise at a […]
Continue readingthe peculiar platypus
The duckbilled platypus is such an odd-looking beast that, when the first specimen made it to Europe, it was widely regarded as a fraud. And you can’t exactly blame people for thinking that – they had never seen an animal anything like a platypus before. Now a study of the platypus genome, published earlier this […]
Continue readingtuskless elephants – natural selection & genetic drift
In an earlier post I mentioned that natural selection (hunting pressure) had the potential to increase the proportion of tusklessness in African elephants. But I also noted that this was probably not the full story! And in fact it turns out to be quite a complex tale.
Continue readingmtDNA & neandertal/sapiens relationships
When I was at high school, mumblety-mumble years ago, the accepted wisdom was that modern humans and Neandertals were sub-species in the same genus: Homo sapiens sapiens and H. sapiens neandertalensis. That changed, to the view that they were probably separate species, with analyses of new fossil finds. More recently, molecular biology techniques have enabled researchers to compare sapiens & […]
Continue readingpopulation genetics of A1 & A2 milk
This is an item I originally wrote for the Science on the Farm website. But because I briefly mentioned the A1/A2 milk thing in the last post, I thought I could usefully bring this across to the Bioblog as well. The 2006 Scholarship Biology paper included a question on the genetics of A1 and A2 […]
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