Tranposons are one of those really cool features of genomes that never really seem to make the jump into the public eye. Most people at least have some conception of what a gene is. It’s a piece of DNA that contains the instructions for making a protein plays some role in the cell. A lot [...]
Posts under ‘evolution’
Oliva Judson’s Salute to Grasses
Talking up Olivia Judson (an English evolutionary biologist who has the trick of getting the general public excited about biology), her post on why grasses are so important in particular, and, for some reason bird’s teeth (they wanted to slip in somewhere).
Feeding birds on a large scale can lead to speciation?
From The Hindu: Humans are inadvertently manipulating bird genetics by innocently providing birds with feeders in winter, according to findings by German researchers. Over less than 30 generations, birds visiting British and European gardens in winter have evolved different-shaped wings and beaks, the scientists say. In time, they could eventually become a distinct species. The [...]
Why I’m so Excited About the Banana Genome
It looks like this time the banana genome really will be sequenced! The justification for sequencing is the combination of the vital importance of bananas as a source of food in the tropics and their lack of crop breeds since most bananas are sterile and only propagated vegetatively. Banana will be the first non-grass monocot sequenced, which is also awesome for me as a grass genomicist because the genome of the banana will be the new window into what the genome of the ancestor of all grasses might have looked like! But click through to read more!
Stalling
It was a very long day at work and I have nothing interesting to tell you. Go check out MAT Kinase and John Hawks‘s posts on how human evolution has been driven by the dietary changes of our relatively recent ancestors, farmers and herders rather than hunter-gatherers. (At least in many cases, it’s quite possible [...]