Quorum sensing Social behavior is not exactly the first term that comes to mind with relation to microbes. After all, we assume a certain amount of intelligence and an ability to implement a behavioral pattern in response to peer actions. Humans, yes. Apes, yes. Birds of a feather flock together… so birds, yes. Ants and [...]
UPDATE: I submitted this post to the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center’s sponsored contest for a travel award to ScienceOnline2010. Let’s see how it goes… #scio10 In a previous post about Hatena we saw what might very well be the beginning of a (beautiful?) [:ttip="symbiosis where one partner lives inside the cell of the other" id="10"]endosymbiotic[:/ttip] [...]
(Thanks to F.B. for the inspiration). Sigh… people don’t seem to learn. It’s been almost 22 years (yikes!) since a distinguished group of scientists published a letter in Cell calling for a responsible use of the word “homology”. If you were born when that letter was published, then in the US you can already drink [...]
In the Hatena story about symbiosis, I posted the following picture drawn by Ernst Haeckel: Beautiful! In this day and age of imaging, high resolution photography, and molecular graphics, we forget that scientific drawing was a skill as necessary to life scientists as microscopic imaging, or molecular graphics is today. Indeed, biology was very much [...]
The story of a predator that, upon eating a certain food, suddenly becomes a peaceful plant. Sort of. Free-living versus symbiotic A working definition for symbiosis is two or more species that live and interact. Mutualism means that each derives a certain benefit from the other, or at most causing no harm to each other. [...]
Mass Extinctions and Genomics The geological signs for mass extinctions are very distinct: the photo shows the boundary of the Cretaceous-Tertiary KT extinction that happened ~65 million years ago (Mya), and killed some 70% of the species on Earth, most famously the dinosaurs. This was the last mass extinction, and its effects on Earth’s life [...]
A short follow up to the previous post on latherin. A quick reminder: latherin is a protein that exists in the horse’s sweat and saliva. In the sweat, latherin acts like a detergent, wetting the horse’s coat to allow for better water evaporation and hence better cooling. In the saliva, it helps wet the horse’s [...]
Dennis Mitchell: “Margaret, you are all sweaty” Margaret Wade: “Dennis, girls don’t sweat. Horses sweat, boys perspire and girls glow” Dennis Mitchell: “Margaret, you are glowing like a horse”. — Dennis the Menace / Hank Ketcham Horses and humans sweat but most other mammals do not. Sweating lowers the body’s surface temperature by evaporating [...]
In the latter epoch of those 2 billion-odd years between non-life and life on early Earth, our ancestral molecular replicators were quite probably RNA, not DNA. There are many arguments for this RNA world hypothesis: RNA can store information in its sequence, and self -duplicate; it can also catalyze reactions as a ribozyme. So technically, [...]
When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, a bunch of people gather for their “Bioinformaticians anonymous” group therapy. There they metaphorically gather, commiserating about how bioinformatics is dead (or was it bioinformaticians?), just smells funny or suffers from identity theft, probably because it got drunk at the last ISMB, [...]
But if you know what life is worth, You will look for yours on Earth — Bob Marley – “Is there life on Earth?” – “Well, duh.” – “I mean, is there another kind of life on Earth?” – “WTF?” – “You know… there could be these bugs that, like, they’re all around us and [...]
Happy Darwin Day! If you are reading this then you probably do not need an introduction to Charles Darwin, the importance of his work, how his theory of evolution by natural selection shaped modern Biology. Or if you do, I bet there are plenty of posts in today’s blogswarm that will address this. There is [...]
Gradualism is a cornerstone principle in evolution. Things happen in small increments; all the time that changes happen, overall organism fitness cannot be compromised. So how then do full-featured complex functions appear? One way is by functional re-purposing of an existing organ: …an organ may become rudimentary for its proper purpose, and be used for [...]
I just went to Shirley Wu’s blog and found this. Apparently February 12-15, 2009 there will be a Blog for Darwin blogswarm, in honor of his 200th birthday and 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (First time I hear this term, blogswarm; not sure if I like it). I wrote [...]
