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!
There has been some madness.
No one has emerged as a frontrunner. Cindy is ahead with 46/64 points, D’s Mike and Sluggo are next with 45, and Daven and Darlene are right behind with 44. Cindy looked especially prescient, calling the Norfolk upset over Missouri. Duke and Missouri definitely busted most, if not all, brackets. Dave Wheeler is showing his keen basketball chops, getting 34/64 points. Most people are clustered around 40.
Elite Eight Update: Cindy continues to lead with 70/96 points. Sluggo is next with 69, then Patrick and Dan McNabney with 67, followed by D’s Mike with 65. We’re starting to see some bracket stratification! 5ish people are in the low 60’s and could be poised to make a jump with some good Final Four predictions.
Final Four Update: Wow. There have been some great games. Dan McNabney got 3/4 of his Final Four and thus made a jump to 91/128 pts to take the lead. Next is Cindy with 86, then Patrick with 83, then D’s Mike with 81, followed by Daven and Cindy(again!) with 80 pts. I’ll update again on Saturday night.
I switched to updating the emails rather than the blog, so sorry for the delay here! The winners for the drawings are Kristin, Festus, and Dufus, receiving 38,19, and 7 dollars, respectively. For the brackets, Dan McNabney won 87 dollars, Cindy won 43, and Zhonghe won 15. I will be double checking these points(Patrick was only one point behind Zhonghe) and then I will be distributing the winnings. Thanks for your participation!
This week in Journal Club we are discussing nuclear-cytoplasmic conflict. The paper we are reading is Wang et al. 2006. See you there!
Dr. Jennifer Brisson from the University of Nebraska is here on Thursday to discuss “The Evolution and Development of Aphid Wing Dimorphisms.”
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.’
On Monday March 5th Olga Zhaxybayeva from West Virginia University will be here to talk about “Evolutionary Bioinformatics in the Postgenomic and Metagenomic Eras.” For more information on Zhaxybayeva’s research you can check out her lab’s web page.
SCIENCE PAPER: Using positional cloning, Loehlin & Werren (2012) have cloned the gene responsible for large differences in male wing size between Nasonia species, and shown it to be a well-known growth regulator called “unpaired” (upd). Further dissecting the region around this gene by fine-scale recombination has revealed regulatory modules affecting spatial and temporal expression of the gene. The upd gene is functionally related to interleukins in humans, which regulate cell growth and differentiation, and are involved in cancer. Loehlin & Werren propose that upd could be a “hotspot” for the evolution of growth regulation in diverse organisms, a proposition that needs to be further investigated. Dave completed his PhD in autumn 2011 and is now a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Sean Carroll. See a podcast interview about the research by Jack. Here is the link to the Univeristy of Rochester press release.
This week we have another double-header. Yasir Ahmed from the Orr Lab will present on “The genetics of pupal case color difference in the virilis group of Drosophila” and Mahul Chakraborty from the Fry Lab will present on “Phenotypic effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms: Insights from aldehyde dehydrogenase of D. melanogaster“. See you 3:00-4:00 pm on Friday (March 2) in Hutchison 316.
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.
This Friday we have two student presentations. Jing Zhu from the Fry Lab will be talking about “Ethanol preference in Drosophila melanogaster” and LeAnne Lovato from the Garrigan Lab will be speaking on “Whole-genome polymorphism in multiple wild isolates of C. elegans.” The Presgraves Lab has generously offered to provide beer following the seminar, so please join us for happy hour in the lounge immediately after the talks.