Sandwalk

                                    Strolling with a skeptical biochemist

Saturday, July 11, 2020

The coronavirus life cycle

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The coronavirus life cycle is depicted in a figure from Fung and Liu (2019). See below for a brief description. The virus particle attaches...
9 comments:
Thursday, July 09, 2020

Structure and expression of the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) genome

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Coronaviruses are RNA viruses, which means that their genome is RNA, not DNA. All of the coronaviruses have similar genomes but I'm sur...
7 comments:
Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Where did your chicken come from?

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Scientists have sequenced the genomes of modern domesticated chickens and compared them to the genomes of various wild pheasants in southern...
2 comments:
Monday, July 06, 2020

A storm of cytokines

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Cytokines are a diverse groups of small signal proteins that act like hormones to turn on genes in blood cells and cells of the immune syste...
13 comments:
Saturday, June 13, 2020

What's in Your Genome? Chapter 3: Repetitive DNA and Mobile Genetic Elements

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By the end of chapter 3, readers will be familiar with two main lines of evidence for junk DNA: the C-Value Paradox, and the fact that most ...
8 comments:

What's in Your Genome? Chapter 2: The Evolution of Sloppy Genomes

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I had to completely reorganize chapter 2 in order to move population genetics closer to the beginning of the book and reduce the number of w...

What's in Your Genome? Chapter 1: Introducing Genomes

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My book is progressing slowly. The main task is to reduce it to about 120,000 words and that's proving to be a lot more difficult that I...
Thursday, June 11, 2020

Dan Graur proposes a new definition of "gene"

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I've thought a lot about how to define the word "gene." It's clear that no definition will capture all the possibilities b...
13 comments:
Saturday, April 18, 2020

Three scientists discuss junk DNA

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I just found this video that was posted to YouTube on May 2019. It's produced by the University of California and it features three rese...
53 comments:
Wednesday, April 08, 2020

Alternative splicing: function vs noise

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This post is about a recent review of alternative splicing published by my colleague Ben Blencowe in the Dept. of Medical Genetics at the U...
39 comments:
Monday, April 06, 2020

The Function Wars Part VII: Function monism vs function pluralism

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This post is mostly about a recent paper published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biol & Biomed Sci where two philosophers pre...
2 comments:
Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Happy Darwin Day! 2020

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Charles Darwin , the greatest scientist who ever lived, was born on this day in 1809 [ Darwin still spurs tributes, debates ] [ Happy Darwin...
16 comments:
Friday, February 07, 2020

The Function Wars Part VI: The problem with selected effect function

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The term "Function Wars" refers to the debate over the meaning of 'function,' especially in the context of junk DNA. 1 Th...
9 comments:
Friday, January 31, 2020

lncRNA nonsense from Los Alamos

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A group of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, NM, USA) and their collaborators in Vienna (Austria) and Lethbridge...
2 comments:
Tuesday, January 14, 2020

The Three Domain Hypothesis: RIP

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The Three Domain Hypothesis died about twenty years ago but most people didn't notice. The original idea was promoted by Carl Woese an...
27 comments:
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