biolog

Firsties!

One impression of the NHGRI sponsored seminar: has the once mighty Drosophila become so blase as to not even get a tip of the hat at a genetics seminar? I would expect as much from a bunch of paleontologists or ecologists, but shame on you geneticists. I wouldn’t interpret this as model bashing, because Mus and Danio had bit rolls in a few of the talks. I think the message is that genomics has moved on. We are now at a stage where researchers are becoming intrepid Victorian specimen collectors, chasing down rare and exotic flora and fauna for their private collection. I thought the smartest point made was that now even humans are a model system, or, rather, everything is a model!

Second: Genetic drift got short shrift. Mutation and random fluctuations in the frequencies of alleles or haplotypes seem like a worthwhile topic when discussing Darwin’s legacy. I would have liked to see more on theory incorporated into the discussion. On a related note, one of the speakers stated that negative mutations were the most common form of mutation. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he either mispoke or I misheard him.

David Kingsley talked about skeletal genes. He made the point that changes in regulatory regions rather than coding regions allow for dramatic phenotypic variation, while keeping it confined to specific tissues. For example, the same genes involved in embryonic development in sticklebacks also regulate armor plating and melanin. Mutations in the corresponding genes in mice and humans are often lethal. Sticklebacks are probably not a lab animal: being anadromous I doubt they can breed them in the lab yet, so all the work is done in hotel bathrooms in Alaska.

There was a bit of junk DNA bashing from Elaine Ostrander, but that’s what makes these events fun. I’m sure if Larry Moran was there, he’d show her what snarkyness really is:

Total Essential (so far) 4.5%
Total Junk (so far) 54%

David Haussler was the third of six speakers at the Darwin @ 200 seminar. Since I saw at least one phlogenetic twig during the presentation, I would hope that the arborist would tackle Haussler’s talk.

A quick note though, either one of the two Davids or Ajit Varki speculated that humans as a species may be immunizing ourselves against the tooth and claw logic of natural selection. I’m not suggesting that natural selection is a tautology, but by what means they have reason to suspect that “natural” selective forces are quantitatively decreasing across the species from Bangor to Bangladesh is a mystery to me. I imagine that what is being put forward is a semantic rather than a real argument.