Author Archives: Noah Snyder-Mackler

A statement on p-values that approaches significance*

Point-oh-five. It’s a pretty polarizing number. Sitting on either side of it could mean the difference between a [insert your favorite journal here] paper and an unpublished paper. But why do some researchers, reviewers, and journal editors put so much weight on this highly … Continue reading

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Haute cuisine: what mystery meat did the Explorers Club dine on in 1951?

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve eaten? Grubs? Alligator? Kudu? I bet nothing you’ve ever eaten comes close to what was purportedly on the menu at at the 47th Explorers Club Annual Dinner in 1951 — Wooly Mammoth.

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Threat down! Data accessibility in long-term studies

It way past Halloween, but something is still out there… and it’s coming for your long-term data. At least that’s what a string of recent opinions and replies in TREE might lead you to believe. But I think that the fears are … Continue reading

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What's living in your coffee machine sludge?

Did you ever wonder what was living in that drip tray in your department’s shared coffee machine? Neither did I. But a few researchers at the Universitat de València in Spain did. And what they found was pretty interesting.

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Post-holiday gift ideas: a draft genome

What do you get the genomicist who has everything? How about a high-quality de novo genome of their favorite species?! How, you ask? Well, using Dovetail’s new Chicago library prep and analysis method.

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It's not you, it's my genes: Sexual fidelity tradeoffs in prairie voles

Many of you may probably already know the monogamous prairie vole as the yin to the promiscuous montane vole’s yang. Prairie voles are socially monogamous, which is an extremely rare trait among mammals. This trait has made the prairie vole … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, next generation sequencing, selection | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Life fast, diapause young: The African turquoise killifish genome

Your newly sequenced genome isn’t going to get into Nature, Science, or Cell just because it “hasn’t been done before”. You need to have a hook. And speaking of hooks, there are two new fish genome papers out in Cell! … Continue reading

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Another uninterpretable epigenetics study

If you looked at your Twitter feed on Sunday you likely saw a lot of buzz about a new study that found that “Holocaust survivors trauma is passed on to children’s genes”. Many people have already taken time to blog … Continue reading

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Inferring kinship from low coverage sequencing data

Knowing the relatedness structure of your population is essential for pretty much any study. Until recently, the only way to determine the kinship structure was to have a detailed pedigree or to estimate relatedness (poorly) using microsatellites. The spurt of … Continue reading

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The Tao of open science for ecology

I think we can all agree that science needs to be transparent, shared, and reproducible. Recently, however, the discussion about “open science” has been conducted mostly in online forums and less so in publications (hopefully Open Access ones!). This is … Continue reading

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