Monthly Archives: July 2015

Raising the NIH pay-line to 20%

Posted on 14 Jul, 2015 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

I bet that title got your attention. In the good ol’ days our funding record made the United States look like the land of milk and honey. As Bruce Alberts’ and colleague wrote in PNAS earlier this year: “The United … Continue reading →

Posted in career, funding, NIH, politics, United States | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Genomics: the "four-headed beast" of Big Data

Posted on 13 Jul, 2015 by Melissa DeBiasse

When I bought my first laptop in 2005, it came with a free 64MB flash drive*, which I thought was pretty awesome. Given the rate at which genomic data generation has increased in the past decade, the storage capacity of … Continue reading →

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The Butterfly Effect

Posted on 9 Jul, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

This might just take the prize for the ‘spiciest’ story in molecular co-evolution for 2015, yet. While a lot of the press coverage sounds like caterpillar thanksgiving, the science behind this study stands for the almost incredible power of molecular phylogenetics … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, natural history, population genetics, selection, speciation, transcriptomics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Can hybridization save a species, genes, or both?

Posted on 8 Jul, 2015 by Rob Denton

Climate change is real, species are going to move around, and it will definitely cause some problems. Even if you aren’t a conservation biologist, the above common knowledge has likely permeated into your scientific life at some level. What conservation … Continue reading →

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Mixed modeling of methylation measures (increase your power by 60%)

Posted on 7 Jul, 2015 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

Do you want to increase your power to detect differentially methylated CpG sites by 60%*? Yes?! Then do I have the pre-print for you.

Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, methods, next generation sequencing, software | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

marmap

Posted on 3 Jul, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

A couple years ago, Benoit Simon-Bouhet ended up sharing an office with Eric Pante, then a post-doc fellow in his former lab. The two quickly realized they were in a lab in which few people had the expertise or taste for coding. Thus, on … Continue reading →

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Dōmo arigatō

Posted on 3 Jul, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Along with my collaborators, Erik Sotka, Courtney Murren, Allan Strand and our battery of students, we have embarked on an intense summer field season. Erik and I are leading the effort of sampling populations of the introduced red seaweed Gracilaria … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, blogging, community, evolution, haploid-diploid, natural history | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Societal constructs, and Genetic diversity

Posted on 2 Jul, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

While we grapple with numerous discoveries of variation in genomic diversity in humans, interest has subsequently risen in understanding their causes/results. Two recent papers describe experiments to determine (a) the effects of marital rules (who gets to marry whom) on … Continue reading →

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Understanding amphibian disease inside out

Posted on 1 Jul, 2015 by Rob Denton

In the spring of 2010, I was doing amphibian surveys among a few wetlands in Eastern Kentucky that were known for their excellent diversity. As I sauntered up to a familiar study site, I was greeted with an amphibian massacre. Hundreds of … Continue reading →

Posted in RNAseq, transcriptomics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment