For this week’s journal club, we will continue our discussion on clade selection. The paper we will be reading is Diversity in Relation to Body Size in Mammals: A Comparative Study.

The next two weeks of journal club will focus on species/clade selection.  Next week we’ll read and discuss how Species Selection Maintains Self-Incompatibility. An additional  review, Species Selection: Theory and Data, is suggested reading.

The topic of discussion for this week’s journal club is: Cell selection — Multicellular organisms and Cancer.  We are reading Tao et al. 2011 paper entitled ‘Rapid growth of a hepatocellular carcinoma and the driving mutations revealed by cell-population genetic analysis of whole-genome data’

An additional review on this topic by Greaves and Maley (2012) ‘Clonal evolution in cancer‘ will also be discussed.

We will be reading Repression of competition favours cooperation: experimental evidence from bacteria by Kummerli et al. for Journal Club on Tuesday  A paper by Travisano and Velicer will provide background on how microbes may prevent cheating.

The cooperative amoeba: Dictyostelium

This week’s topic is the group selection controversy. We are reading Kuzdal-Fick’s 2011 science paper ‘High Relatedness Is Necessary and Sufficient to Maintain Multicellularity.’  Leigh’s paper ‘The  group selection controversy’ is for concept and background.   See you there!

This week in Journal Club we are discussing nuclear-cytoplasmic conflict.  The paper we are reading is Wang et al. 2006. See you there!

We are reading Fishman and Saunders 2008 Science paper titled ‘Centromere-Associated Female Meiotic Drive Entails Male Fitness Costs in Monkeyflowers’ for the 3/6 Journal Club. We are also reading an additional review on this topic by Malik and Henikoff (2009) ‘Major evolutionary transitions in centromere complexity.’

This week we will be reading about the Post Segregation Distorter Medea and it’s association with a transposon.  You can also read the original paper describing Medea.

We will be reading ‘Ancestral capture of syncytin-Car1, a fusogenic endogenous retroviral envelope gene involved in placentation and conserved in Carnivora’ at the next Journal Club.  Everyone is welcome to come at 12:30 on Tuesday!

Next week’s journal club topic is Transposable Element Population Dynamics. We will discuss Widespread evidence for horizontal transfer of transposable elements across Drosophila genomes by Bartolome and colleagues (2009). An additional review paper from the Feschotte lab will serve as background material.