With the summers conference season over, GigaScience are still keeping mobile, and this week Laurie is taking in “Beyond the Genome”, our BioMed Central stablemates Genome Biology and Genome Medicine meeting in Washington

The next post will discuss recent evidence for genetic hitchhiking in humans. So, what do we mean when we say that genes can hitchhike? To make sense of this phenomenon, we first need to review chromosomes and sexual reproduction. Most people know that sexual reproduction creates offspring that are genetically distinct from both of the their parents.

Titktaalik roseae.Image fromhttps://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/index.html The second post in my series on limb evolution is now up at the BioLogos site. This installment reviews the fossil evidence on fin-to-limb evolution, introducing the famous Tiktaalik . Next up: evidence from developmental biology. The first post at BioLogos outlined limb structure and some historical background.

Recently, NSF has changed the process for proposal submission for the core panels in the Directorate for Biological Sciences. Wondering if this might be important to you? Please answer the following questions: do you study some aspect of biology (defined as anything from the molecular to ecosystem levels)?, do you intend to submit a proposal to NSF someday?

Not surprisingly, Hamlet weighed in on the nature vs. nurture question, at least once. It is certainly true that "the stamp of one defect" can wreak havoc on the scale that Hamlet describes, and whether the result is a debilitating physical limitation or damage to "the pales and forts of reason," the outcome is tragic by any measure.

Our whistlestop summer conference tour circumnavigating the globe has come to a jetlagged end, with the final conference being last weeks HUPO (Human Proteomics Organisation) congress in Geneva.

The Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming is advertising some postdoctoral fellowships (details below). There are a number of stellar people out there (including friend of Weecology, Jake Goheen, who sent us the ad), so we strongly recommend checking out the opportunity if you’re looking for a postdoc or know someone who is: Berry Postdoctoral Fellowships Berry Postdoctoral Fellowships are

Last month, I started a series on the topic of limb evolution, here at Quintessence of Dust. That series has been transformed (through a series of intermediates) into a series of posts* at the BioLogos site. The first installment is now up, and it provides an expanded introduction to the topic and a little historical context.

There is an exciting postdoc opportunity for folks interested in quantitative approaches to studying evolution in Michael Gilchrist’s lab at the University of Tennessee. I knew Mike when we were both in New Mexico. He’s really sharp, a nice guy, and a very patient teacher. He taught me all about likelihood and numerical maximization and opened my mind to a whole new way of modeling biological systems.

Latest stop on the GigaScience magical mystery conference tour is Science Online London, and this year they have tried to make the format more interactive by organizing several interactive workshops and breakout sessions, including one on blogging that this is posting is a product of. One of the main themes running through the meeting has of course been open science (especially in the great keynote by Michael Nielson), and open-data