Larry Moran has been writing about olfactory receptors (1, 2, 3). The last two focus on work that has come out of Masatoshi Nei's group on the evolution of gene families -- OR genes being a archetype of gene family evolution.
More like this
John Hawks has an interesting post on what it means to be human in which he argues that our "human-ness" (humanity?) is our shared evolutionary history. I like it. But Hawks also writes the following:
Targeted discovery of novel human exons by comparative genomics:
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone.