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There has been a lot of interest in tardigrades (aka “water bears”) recently. Not just because they’re very cool, but because they seem to have some very curious genomes. Maybe. See, in a paper published in PNAS on November 23rd, Boothby et al. (2015) reported evidence of “extensive horizontal gene transfer” in the […] This recent genome paper has it all: “reveal“, “insights“, and the platypus fallacy. So, you and several dozen totally essential collaborators have been hard at work sequencing the genome of a super important species, and you’re ready to write up your results. Between doing the same analyses as every other genome sequencing study and overselling the novelty and significance of your results, you probably don’t have time to […] Maybe you thought a lot of genome papers provide “insights” — and you’d be right. But did you know that even more genome papers “reveal” stuff? It’s true! Here’s a list of nearly 500 examples. Abe, A., et al. (2012). “Genome sequencing reveals agronomically important loci in rice using MutMap.” Nature Biotechnology 30(2): 174-178. […] Amemiya, C. T., et al. (2013). “The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution.” Nature 496(7445): 311-316. Anderson, I., et al. (2011). “Novel Insights into the Diversity of Catabolic Metabolism from Ten Haloarchaeal Genomes.” PloS one 6(5). Angelov, A. and W. Liebl (2006). “Insights into extreme thermoacidophily based on genome analysis of Picrophilus […] Here’s the first sentence from a paper published recently in Genome by Vibhu Ranjan Prasad and Karin Isler: Gene content, the number of genes coding for proteins, is correlated with genome size in both noneukaryotes and eukaryotes (Lynch and Conery 2003; Konstantinidis and Tiedje 2004; Gregory 2002, 2005). Say what? The whole C-value […] Example headline: Massive Daphnia genome leads to understanding gene-environment interactions Photo by Paul Hebert It’s a cool species, an important addition to the cadre of species whose genomes have been sequenced, it has a notably large number of genes (>30,000, according to the current annotation — rice has >40,000, by the way), and […] Two students and I currently have a paper in review on genome sizes in sponges, but whether it is accepted or needs major revisions, we will have to update the reference list. This is because the genome sequence of the sponge Amphimedon queenslandica was just published. This is very cool, and allows some interesting […] Go read Carl Zimmer’s post “Yet-Another-Genome Syndrome” for an example of a science writer who truly gets it. Go. Right now. And add YAGS to your dictionary, along with DAP. 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 […] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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