Tag Archives: genomics

Towards unrestricted use of public genomic data

Last week, a friend sent me this policy forum article published in Science. Fifty co-authors, mostly tenured and from prestigious universities, some of them among my dearest idols, have written this piece to call for publicly available genome data. What … Continue reading

Posted in career, community, data archiving, genomics, science publishing | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Symbiotic organs shaped by distinct modes of genome evolution in cephalopods

Last week I was whining about gaps in our understanding of evolutionary processes in the ocean. The universe heard me, and today I am satisfied to write about the published genome of Euprymna scolopes – the Hawaiian bobtail squid and … Continue reading

Posted in Coevolution, evolution, genomics, microbiology, next generation sequencing, Symbiosis | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Conference catch-up: The many colors of snow

Red snow … watermelon snow … green snow … did you know that snow came in so many different colors? I had never heard of watermelon ice (#🍉❄) until a talk given by Robin Kodner from Western Washington University at … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, citizen science, community ecology, evolution, fieldwork, mating system, microbiology, natural history, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, transcriptomics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Microbiomes of a small conference

The conference season is almost over. There are still a few gems out there worth attending before school starts. I just came back from the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Conference which took place at a UCLA resort in the mountains. … Continue reading

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Major new microbial groups expand diversity and alter our understanding of the tree of life

I still believe in revolutions. And sometimes they just happen, almost unnoticed. One such revolution happened on a boring 11th of April 2016 when Laura Hug et al. published their new tree of life in the journal of Nature Microbiology. … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, community ecology, evolution, genomics, metagenomics, microbiology, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Visualize your genome assemblies

Bandage (a Bioinformatics Application for Navigating De novo Assembly Graphs Easily), is a program that creates visualisations of sequence assemblies that you can interact with. When assembling a genome with your favorite assembler, you are usually building graphs, from which … Continue reading

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We have the technology. Is sequencing getting better, smaller, faster?

Okay, I know some version of the phrase “recent developments in rapid and affordable sequencing have made blah blah blah possible…” is something you’ve probably read 10,000 times. However, third-generation sequencing platforms have turned out to be pretty darn astounding. … Continue reading

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Small Molecules, Big Differences

Mary Latimer wrote this post as a final project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Science Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is a third year PhD student at UAB studying miRNAs and methionine restriction. Her hobbies include cats, netflix, … Continue reading

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Hybridization and adaptive radiations

As an iconic system in evolutionary biology, I’ve always been interested in African cichlids and the origins of their diversity1. These cichlids represent an adaptive radiation; they’ve evolved rapidly from a single origin to exploit and speciate into open niches … Continue reading

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Diving into the inbreeding depression

This post is going to be a little melodramatic, but I hope that despite all the reading on inbreeding depression, you won’t get depressed. As the media finally started feeding us all the catastrophic news about the impact of global … Continue reading

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