Sandwalk

Kat Arney has written a very good book on genes and gene expression. She covers all the important controversies in a thorough and thoughtful...

There are several ways to report a mutation rate. You can state it as the number of mutations per base pair per year in which case a typical...

Most mitochondrial genes have been transferred from the ancestral mitochondrial genome to the nuclear genome over the course of 1-2 billion ...

Lateral gene transfer (LGT), or horizontal gene transfer (HGT), is widespread in bacteria. It leads to the creation of pangenomes for many b...

The authors of the original draft of the human genome sequence claimed that hundreds of genes had been acquired from bacteria by lateral gen...

Theme Mutation -definition -mutation types -mutation rates -phylogeny -controversies Mutations are mostly due to errors in DNA repl...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of DNA sequencing technology (Gilbert and Maxam, 1977; Sanger et al., 1977) 1 The Sanger technique soo...

Mammals have two sex chromosomes: X and Y. Males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome and females have two X chromosomes. Since female...

This is the second post discussing creationist 1 papers on pseudogenes. The first post addressed a paper by Jeffrey Tomkins on the β-globin...

Jonathan Kane recently (Oct. 6, 2017) posted an article on The Panda's Thumb where he claimed that Young Earth Creationists often don...

Modern evolutionary theory is based on the idea that alleles become fixed in a population over time. They can be fixed by natural selection ...

Most eukaryotes are diploid, including humans. They have two copies of each autosome. Thousands of human genomes have been sequenced but in ...

I'm working (slowly) on a book called What's in Your Genome?: 90% of your genome is junk! The first chapter is an introduction to g...

This is a podcast from Cold Spring Harbor [ Dark Matter of the Genome, Pt. 1 (Base Pairs Episode 8) ]. The authors try to convince us that ...