Bridget Kendall and guests explore the current understanding of how DNA works, why it needs constant repair in every living organism and how new DNA-altering techniques can help cure some medical conditions. Joining Bridget are Swedish Nobel Laureate and Francis Crick Institute Emeritus Group Leader Tomas Lindahl who pioneered DNA repair studies, medical […]
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 […]
In one sense, I am happy that there is enough interest in the concept of “junk DNA” (and by extension, my area of research in genome size evolution) that the subject gets regular media attention. A few months ago, it was all about the ENCODE project and its “finding” of “function” for 80% of […]
I’ll just let this soup sandwich of an abstract speak for itself:
We find that the global relationships among species should be of circular phylogeny, which is quite different from common sense based on phylogenetic trees. A domain can be defined by a distinct phylogenetic circle, which is a global and stable characteristic of […]
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).
Here is the video of my talk at the Stephen J. Gould’s Legacy: Nature, History, Society meeting held at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, Italy.
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 […]