In yesterday’s Transposon Week post, I discussed how transposons can spread through a species by without providing any benefit to the animals, plants, fungus, or micro-organisms that host them. Adding a little extra useless DNA doesn’t help an organism survive, but it also doesn’t cause serious harm. But in yesterday’s post I completely avoided one [...]
Posts under ‘genomics’
Transposons: The Difference Between Junk DNA and Selfish DNA
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 [...]
Welcome to transposon week here at James and the Giant Corn!
I’m just about wrapped up with the big project I’ve been working on recently. Hope to be able to say more about it in the not-too-distant future. Having to be secretive in science sucks. But there’s a lot of be happy about! I’m done teaching for a long time. As much as I enjoyed working [...]
The Peach Genome Is Out
Here. I had no idea anyone was even considering sequencing the peach genome until I heard a single off-hand comment at the maize meeting last month, and all of the sudden here it is. And in better shape in its first release than some genomes are even after they’re published. This is a pre-publication release, [...]
The two genomes of maize
I recently go back from the maize meeting. I mentioned before that big part of the reason to do poster presentations is to get comfortable discussing ones research with people who haven’t specialized in the exact same subject. In my case, my poster got a fair bit of interest which was great. (Although I was [...]
Missing Genes on a Massive Scale
Edit: stripped out all the numbers as they clearly applied to an earlier version of the data and I don’t know if the new ones are intended for public release yet. Last november when the maize genome was published, one of the companion papers looked at genes where a different number of copies were found [...]
And the list gets better!
Based on e-mails and responses to my previous post I’ve made the following additions to the sequenced plant genomes page: Added an entry on Columbine, a member of an early diverging group of eudicots. As far as I can tell this sequence is currently unreleased, but from the JGI website it looks like the initial [...]
Wow!
Who could have predicted maize geneticists would be so interested in maize genes? The entry I posted last night on Purple plant1 and Colored aleurone1 easily received more traffic in its first day on the site (it’s still got a long way to go before it catches long term readership attractors like water chestnuts and [...]