Remember the flap about a German scientist restricting the license to his software (Treefinder) to protest European immigration policies? Not a great idea if your software is published in an open access journal.
Gangolf Jobb cut off licensing of his program to European countries he considered too welcoming to immigrants. Last week, BMC Evolutionary Biology published a retraction of the 2004 article that introduced Treefinder, citing their policy on software availability:
Snowflake yeast, with apoptotic cells in red.
As part of their series on “Life’s Big Leaps,” Quanta Magazine has published an article about Will Ratcliff’s snowflake yeast research (“Life’s Secrets Sought in a Snowflake“).
A new(ish) paper in National Science Review evaluates the evidence for various interpretations of Ediacaran microfossils from the Weng’an biota in South China (Xiao et al. 2014. The Weng’an biota and the Ediacaran radiation of multicellular eukaryotes. Natl. Sci. Rev., 1:498–520.). I recommend checking it out; it’s open access, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there that I’m not going to address.
These fossils are undoubtedly multicellular, probably eukaryotic, and extremely enigmatic. Their age (582-600 million years) means they could have important implications for the evolution of multicellularity, and their exceptional preservation in great numbers creates the potential for reconstructing their life cycles in great detail. Some of the Weng’an fossils have been interpreted as volvocine algae, an interpretation that I find highly unlikely.
Some of the Weng’an fossils are thought to represent red algae, and this would not be terribly surprising, since red algae have been around for at least 1.2 billion years. Others, for example the tubular fossils, are more problematic, with interpretations as diverse as cyanobacteria, eukaryotic algae, crinoids, and cnidarians.
Figure 8 from Xiao et al. 2014: Schematic diagram showing diagnostic features of the five recognized species of tubular microfossils in the Weng’an biota.
Fig. 1 from Kato-Minoura et al. 2015: Genomic structure of volvocine actin and NAP genes. For comparison, previously identified sequences are also shown. Filled boxes, putative coding exons; open boxes, putative 5′ and 3′ untranslated regions. Intervening sequences are shown by solid lines. Intron positions are indicated by codon and phase numbers with reference to the three alpha-actins of vertebrates (377 amino acids) (Weber and Kabsch 1994). The conserved intron positions are linked with dotted lines. ATG, translation start codon; TAA or TGA, stop codon.
On the second day of AbSciCon, members of the Ratcliff lab and I met with a reporter, Bob Holmes, from New Scientist. We had all given our talks on the first day of the meeting. The resulting article came out yesterday.
I’ve dealt with New Scientist before, and I find them among the better science news outlets. They make a real effort to understand the science behind their stories, a refreshing change from sites that slap misleading headlines onto barely reworded university press releases. Aaaand I’m going to wrap this up before it turns into a rant.
Peter Conlin, Jennifer Pentz, Bob Holmes, and Will Ratcliff enjoying some sushi in a Chicago park.
A 32-celled colony of Pleodorina starrii with 12 somatic cells.