http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/39332/title/Convergent-Fish-Fins/

Some researchers are looking at another morphological structure of modern day fish to investigate fish evolution.

“Adipose fins are small, fleshy and usually not as elaborately structured as other fins. Although some 6,000 species of fish—including trout, catfish, and salmon—have them, relatively few researchers have studied these structures in the last half-century.”

They plan to explore early changes that may be linked to the transition to tetrapods.  The beauty of cience is there is always another question!

http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/supercomputer-analyzes-240-full-genomes-in-two-days/81249533/

I saw this headline today-
February 20, 2014, 10:30 AM EST.
Supercomputer Analyzes 240 Full Genomes in Two Days

It will probably take us several weeks with all of your brains put together to analyze 1 very small genome. The technology is changing fast.  Sequencing is getting faster and cheaper, but what about the time and expense of analyzing?  Data doesn’t mean much if it is just sitting on the desktop.

Your generation will be analyzing and utilizing genome sequences more and more for diagnostics.  Computers will be doing the analysis.  Who will decide what to do with the results? What do you think?

Did you know that Darwin discovered a frog in South America that is only about 2 cm in size? The male frogs carry the baby frogs in their mouth while they mature.  Watch this!  http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/animals/amphibians-animals/frogs-and-toads/weirdest-darwins-frog/

Read more about it here.

It may be extinct?

I really enjoyed your presentations last week.  All of the topics demonstrated to me that we have only just begun to understand how cells work and communicate, but knowing what we know allows so many good things to occur.

Imagine being the scientists that spend their life designing and testing a prosthetic hand and then learning that the individual trying it out can actually feel with it!  This is the latest of several breakthroughs in this area.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prosthetic-provides-sense-touch-man-who-lost-hand

The future looks bright to me!

The SEA Phage members that isolated cluster J Phages all got together and published a paper in PLoS.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0069273

This is a great paper to read slowly over this semester as you learn more about phage genomes.

I think it is so interesting how they discovered 2 introns using the alignment tools and then confirmed their hypothesis by isolating and analyzing the predicted proteins.

They described a “luxuriant mobilome”….Maybe we will see something similar?

I think most of you know that I am interested in Staphylococcus aureus, particularly alternatives to treating this disease with antibiotics.  This week I read a news report that describes a hopeful vaccine.  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131220143124.htm

The research was published in the Journal of Infectious Disease.  I wonder what type of biotech is required to make this vaccine?

Have you ever read Small Things Considered?  It is the Microbe Blog put out by American Society for Microbiology.  A recent blog describes how phages infect bacteria.  It seems that some icosahedral phages “grow” a tail after absorption.  These describe Gram negative bacteriophage, but Gram positive bacteria have a thicker peptidoglycan cell wall.  I wonder if any cryo EM has been taken on Mycobacteriophage adsorbing and infecting?

http://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2014/01/bridges-across-the-periplasmic-moat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+schaechter+%28Small+Things+Considered%29

It is possible that the reason for our grainy agar (and lack of plaques) is not due to the concentration or age of our saturated culture, but instead the temperature of the incubator that the top agar plates were grown in.  Can you design an experiment to test this hypothesis?