Drosophila
evolgen | May 16, 2006Michael Ashburner has written a book. No, not that book. This one's a bit smaller, less expensive, and about the sequencing of the Drosophila melanogaster genome. You can read a review of the book here and buy it from here. It's not The Genome War; Matt Ridley describes it as Ashburner's "immediate reactions, mostly committed to paper at the time -- an idiosyncratic, gonzo romp through the crazy days of 1998-99."
In his review, Ridley describes Ashburner's dislikes, joys, and vices:
Being a scientist, Ashburner hates hotels (especially Marriotts), Microsoft, bad coffee and suits -- the…
evolgen | May 12, 2006I've been busy this past week (and I'll be busy in the next couple of weeks to come), so I don't have much time to post to evolgen. For this reason this week's Phylogeny Friday is a recycled post from the old site. Check out the comments on the original entry for some remarks from one of the authors of the paper I discuss. I'll try to get some original content up here, but blogging may be slow until the end of the month.
Now that we have entered the post-genomics era, with the genomes of most model organisms completely sequenced (as well as the human genome), it is up to genome centers,…
evolgen | May 10, 2006
Twelve Drosophila species from the picture wing clade are now protected under the Endangered Species Act, according to this LiveScience article. The picture wing flies are endemic to Hawaii and characterized by their colorful wings. They are also larger than most other Drosophilids. D. grimshawi (pictured above) is the lone picture wing fly in the Drosophila genomes project.
evolgen | April 25, 2006Bora has been pushing the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts can be found below. Part 2 of this series (The Backstory) can be found after the jump.
Previous entries:
Part 1 - Introduction
The Backstory
The enzyme fructose-1,6-bisphosphate aldolase (hereafter referred to as aldolase) is responsible for splitting fructose-1,6-bisphosphate into glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate and dihydroxyacetone-phosphate during glycolysis.…
evolgen | April 21, 2006Pharyngula has a good summary of the new Sean Carroll Drosophila wing dot paper. Eventually Sean's gonna try to mess around with a hawaiin species and blow the roof off this mother.
evolgen | January 17, 2006PZ Myers is reposting some of his greatest hits from the old Pharyngula website to his new digs at ScienceBlogs. In one post he gets into the deficiencies of modern evolutionary theory using West-Eberhard's book as a guide. I agree with most of the thing he says (and I'll get into how I agree with him below), but first I need to scratch a pet-peeve itch:
"You can see this in any textbook of population genetics: the effect of selection is to impose a gradual shift in the mode of a pattern of continuous variation. Stabilizing selection chops off both tails of the distribution, directional…