Migrating old posts from fierceroller.com turned out to be pretty easy, but the quick & dirty method I used didn’t update internal links. So links to old posts in old posts (prior to March 14th) will take you to the old site. This isn’t a huge problem, since the old site is still there, but I will be looking for a way to fix it.
I got an email out of the blue from David Kirk, and I thought some of it would be of interest. Dr. Kirk is one of the biggest names in Volvox research: he carried out much of the developmental genetics that forms the foundation of our field, he literally wrote the book on Volvox evo-devo, and my impression is that most of the PIs currently studying Volvox spent time in his lab as students and postdocs.
The email was prompted by the meeting review from the 2015 meeting in Cambridge (he liked it, whew! :-D), and he said that he’s looking forward to the 2017 meeting in St. Louis. The email also had a footnote with some interesting information, which I quote here with Dr. Kirk’s permission:
I got word Sunday night that my application to join the blogging community at Freethought Blogs was approved, so starting today Fierce Roller will be located at https://freethoughtblogs.com/fierceroller/. I’m trying to figure out how to migrate previous posts to the new platform; meanwhile, this site isn’t going anywhere (it just won’t be updated).
Volvox aureus. Beautiful, isn’t it?
Figure 1 from Wang et al. 2016. Effects of bactericide/fungicide cocktails on the removal of microbial contaminants from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii cultures. (A) Control plate. (B) Plate with the One-shot Solution cocktail composed of ampicillin, cefotaxime, and carbendazim. (C) Plate with axoxystrobin and nalidixic acid. (D) Plate with tebuconazole and nalidixic acid. 1: uncontaminated cultures; 2–4: contaminated cultures containing fungi and bacteria.
A new paper in BioTechniques describes an improved antibiotic cocktail for controlling bacterial and fungal contamination of Chlamydomonas cultures. This is a problem that has cost our lab many hours, especially when using media that include acetate.
Registration and abstract submission are open for the 2nd ASM Conference on Experimental Microbial Evolution. The keynote address will be given by Richard Lenski, and plenary speakers include Shelley Copley, Michael Desai, Ivana Gudelj, and Bernhard Palsson.
Fig. 1 from Herron 2016. Examples of volvocine species. (A) Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, (B) Gonium pectorale, (C) Astrephomene gubernaculiferum, (D) Pandorina morum, (E) Volvulina compacta, (F) Platydorina caudata, (G) Yamagishiella unicocca, (H) Colemanosphaera charkowiensis, (I) Eudorina elegans, (J) Pleodorina starrii, (K) Volvox barberi, (L) Volvox ovalis, (M) Volvox gigas, (N) Volvox aureus, (O) Volvox carteri. Figure Credit for A and B: Deborah Shelton.
Pretty much what the title says: the meeting review from Volvox 2015 is online early at Molecular Ecology. That only took six months! This is the final, published version. Thanks for a great meeting, and thanks to everyone who read earlier drafts!
No, you don’t have to pay to read this blog post. Or most scientific articles.
I often blog about peer-reviewed articles, and some of those articles are behind a paywall. There’s a large and growing trend toward open access journals, which charge the authors a publication fee and make their articles available to everyone for free, but this is far from universal. A lot of the big, high-profile journals, such as Science, Nature, PNAS, Ecology Letters, and Current Biology still charge for their articles. And the charges aren’t trivial. A typical scientific paper might cite 50-100 previous articles, and an author might have to read two or three times that many that don’t end up being cited. If you had to pay $38 for each one of those articles, you’d be a lot less inclined to do a thorough literature search.
I’ve mentioned “Chlamy Song” and “Sammy the Chlamy,” but I missed that there is (or was) a band called Chlamydomonas!