Pfffffffffft!
From the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology comes a press release describing a paper in Nature about bacterial evolution… Bacteria Expect the Unexpected Organisms ensure the survival of their species by genetically adapting to the environment. If environmental conditions change too rapidly, the extinction of a species may be the consequence. A strategy to successfully cope with such a challenge is the generation of variable offspring that can survive in different environments. Even though a portion of the offspring may have a decreased chance to surviv

10,000 genomes.
Lots of genomes going to be sequenced. Some of the members of the group are colleagues at Guelph. Very cool. That is all. Genome 10K: A Proposal to Obtain Whole-Genome Sequence for 10 000 Vertebrate Species Genome 10K Community of Scientists The human genome project has been recently complemented by whole-genome assessment sequence of 32 mammals and 24 nonmammalian vertebrate species suitable for comparative genomic analyses. Here we anticipate a precipitous drop in costs and increase in sequencing efficiency, with concomitant development of improved annotation tech

Another, um, good reason to care about genome sizes.
You denizens of the science blogosphere probably will have heard about the, shall we say, “questionable” article by Donald Williamson (and communicated by Lynn Margulis) in PNAS, in which he claimed that insect larvae arose via hybridization between non-metamorphosing ancestral insects and Onychophora (velvet worms). Maybe this sounds silly to you.  Me too.  It also sounded silly to Hart and Grosberg (2009), who thorou

Nature vs. hype.
From today’s Nature, an editorial entitled Mind the spin: Scientists — and their institutions — should resist the ever-present temptation to hype their results. [skipping to the money quote...] …the temptation for scientists and their institutions to spin their research to the media, or to go publicity-mongering, is always there. And — as illustrated by the excessive public-relations campaign surrounding Ida, a fossil presented as a missing link in human evolution — too many in the media will buy into the initial hype. Such behaviou

Isn’t email supposed to save us time?
Me: Isn’t email supposed to save us time? is a post from Genomicron.