Scientific facts not determined by opinion poll.

I've posted on this before but since many of you are ,ultimately, PhD bound you may as well start reading it now. PhD comics tells it like it is. Life in the lab, dealing with advisors, eating noodles and the occasional snarky comment about the media. Be aware the archive is pretty vast......

Anciently asexual

Spore-bearing fungal parasites emerge from the digested corpses of three bdelloid rotifers.

Wow, I was just looking around for something to post on and there it is right on the cover of Science this week. Great story and highly relevant to class.

Anciently Asexual Bdelloid Rotifers Escape Lethal Fungal Parasites by Drying Up and Blowing Away

Asexuality has major theoretical advantages over sexual reproduction. An important evolutionary puzzle, therefore, is why exclusively asexual metazoan lineages rarely endure. The Red Queen hypothesis posits that asexuality is rapidly extinguished by relentlessly coevolving parasites and pathogens. If so, any long-lasting asexual lineage must have unusual alternative mechanisms to deal with these biotic enemies. Bdelloid rotifers are freshwater invertebrates that abandoned sexual reproduction millions of years ago. Here, we show that cultured populations of bdelloids can rid themselves of a deadly fungal parasite through complete desiccation (anhydrobiosis) and disperse by wind to establish new populations in its absence. In Red Queen models, spatiotemporal escape can decouple and protect asexuals from coevolving enemies. Thus, our results may help to explain the persistence of the anciently asexual Bdelloidea.

Synchronicity

Cool! Listen to the end for some interesting potential applications.

You can read the paper, A synchronized quorum of genetic clocks, in this week's edition of the journal Nature.

Incidentally, although some of the YouTube comments seem to think that 'Mexican Wave' is some sort of racist comment this is the term most widely used in England for a synchronised 'wave' in a large sports stadium (usually just called 'the wave' here in the US). In England this sort of behavior was not common until it was seen on TV during the 1986 world cup in Mexico and so it became associated with Mexico even though it hardly originated there.

Snus - Smokeless Tobacco Made Easy

Now available over the internet and in stores; Snus (rhymes with loose), a smokeless tobacco product containing nicotine that originated in Sweden. Snus comes in colorful tins and is packaged in small tea bag-like packets. It’s real advantage over traditional smokeless chewing tobacco is that no spitting is necessary - the small amount of juice produced can just be swallowed. It’s likely to become popular among teens who want their tobacco use to go undetected, patrons of bars and restaurants where smoking is not permitted, and smokers who want to quit.

The tobacco companies are looking to attract a whole new generation of tobacco users and to shore up profits in the face of declining cigarette sales. R.J. Reynolds launched a nationwide marketing campaign for “Camel Snus” in 2009. As usual, the company denies that it aims its marketing campaign toward underage users.

So far there is no evidence that Snus use may be a risk factor for cancers of the mouth and throat. Nevertheless, it is a tobacco product. It’s worth remembering that there were no clear health risks associated with cigarettes, either, when they first became popular in the 1940s.

CCS, Telomeres and Gaucho fun

I guess this is more relevant to cell biology or physiology but I thought some of you may be interested in this article in the New York Times today that describes research published in the journal Circulation that demonstrates that physical exercise can actually keep your cells younger.

Cell 'age' was assessed by looking at their telomere length. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year you are probably aware that telomeres are tiny caps on the end of DNA strands and the discovery of their function won several scientists, including CCS biology graduate, Carol Greider, the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine.

The research looked at four groups of people: young and sedentary; middle-aged and sedentary; young professional runners in their 20s; and finally middle-aged longtime runners.

Cells in both the active and sedentary young adults had similar-size telomeres because when you are young none of your cells are old enough to have significantly shortened telomeres. But when they examined the middle aged groups they found a HUGE difference

In general, telomere loss was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ‘‘at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect.’’

This study of course raises a lot of questions but it is really nice to have such a large effect and hopefully follow up studies will clarify how much exercise is required and for how long. The middle aged runners in the study were running an average of 50 miles a week and had a 35 year training history.

Anyhow if you want to stop your telomeres shortening you may need to start running now. Fortunately this Saturday sees the return of the UCSB Running Series. A good incentive to get out of bed and drag yourself around the lagoon a few times (and then eat pizza).

Living With Cystic Fibrosis

Sixty years ago, before doctors knew very much about cystic fibrosis, most children with the disease died before school age. Today people with the disorder are living well into their 30s. Today we know that cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder and we know what causes the symptoms.

What we don’t have is a cure. Prolonging the life of cystic fibrosis patients is largely based on improvement of care, including medicines that alleviate some manifestations of the disease and physical therapy to keep the lungs clear. What works for one patient doesn’t always work as well for the next.

An effective tool in the improvement of care for cystic fibrosis patients has been the establishment of a national registry of patients. The registry, which is managed by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, currently collects and stores patient records from more than 100 cystic fibrosis treatment centers across the country. The pooled data has proven very useful in learning what works best for which kinds of patients, and why. It’s like having the collective experience of thousands of doctors right at your fingertips.

The concept of a using a national registry of patients to improve patient care has proven so successful that other patient groups are copying it.

Horizontal and vertical evolution

There's a great article in this week's New Scientist magazine about evolution and horizontal gene transfer. It's so relevant to class (and so interesting) you should all read this one:
Horizontal and vertical: The evolution of evolution
I thought the discussion of the evolution of the three base genetic code was fascinating. The PNAS paper that produced these results is available here.

JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.

At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself. Since micro-organisms represented most of life on Earth for most of the time that life has existed - billions of years, in fact - the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn't Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.