Many of the talks from AbSciCon 2015, including some that I’ve written about here, are now available on NASA’s website. You’ll need Adobe Connect to watch the talks, but they are only 15 minutes (including Q&A).
Biosphere 2, the site of the First International Volvox Meeting in 2011.
This year’s Volvox meeting, as with the previous two, will feature an image/video/arts competition. Erik Hanschen, a graduate student in the Michod lab, has kindly granted me permission to post the winning entry in the poetry contest at the first Volvox meeting: a sonnet in honor of Chlamydomonas.
An Ode to Unicellularity – Erik Hanschen
I mentioned in my NASA Postdoctoral Program alumni seminar that creationists really don’t like research into the origins of multicellularity:
Slide from my NPP alumni seminar.
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.
Posts may be thin this week. I am preparing a talk for AbSciCon and a manuscript that’s due Monday. Saturday morning, I will board the Empire Builder in Whitefish for a 30-hour ride to Chicago (no doubt some of the manuscript will be written on the train).
Meanwhile, here’s a song about Chlamydomonas (skip to 1:05 if you don’t want to hear the intro).
Figure 1 from Kianianmomeni 2015. Gene regulatory mechanisms behind the evolution of multicellularity. Model illustrating the role of gene regulatory mechanisms in the evolution of multicellular Volvox from a Chlamydomonas-like ancestor.
2015 UMCUR award winners with UM President Royce Engstrom.
Undergraduate Maggie Boyd has been awarded the Life Sciences Poster Award in the University of Montana Conference for Undergraduate Research for her poster “Motility in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.” This is kind of a big deal: only one poster award and one oral presentation award were bestowed in Life Sciences university-wide.
Maggie has also recently been awarded a Honerkamp-Smith Travel Grant to attend the Third International Volvox Meeting in Cambridge, U.K. this summer.
The somatic cells commit suicide by a process known as apoptosis — programmed cell death — that I wrote about here. This process involves a minimum of several novel genes as well.
Partial alignment of representative type I and type II metacaspase predicted sequences from red algae (Porphyra yezoensis; Py), green algae (Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, Cr; Volvox carteri, Vc), vascular plants (Arabidopsis thaliana; At), excavates (Trypanosoma cruzi, Tc; Leishmania braziliensis, Lb), diatoms (Thalassiosira pseudonana, Tp; Phaeodactylum tricornutum, Pt), haptophytes (Emiliania huxleyi; Eh), pelagophytes (Auroecoccus anaphagefferens; Aa), yeasts (Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Sp; Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Sc) showing the conservation of the cysteine-histidine dyad and the insertion characteristic of plant type II metacaspases. From Nedelcu, A.M. 2009. Comparative genomics of phylogenetically diverse unicellular eukaryotes provide new insights into the genetic basis for the evolution of the programmed cell death machinery. J. Mol. Evol., 68: 256–268. doi 10.1007/s00239-009-9201-1.