Sandwalk

The coronavirus life cycle is depicted in a figure from Fung and Liu (2019). See below for a brief description. The virus particle attaches...

Coronaviruses are RNA viruses, which means that their genome is RNA, not DNA. All of the coronaviruses have similar genomes but I'm sur...

Scientists have sequenced the genomes of modern domesticated chickens and compared them to the genomes of various wild pheasants in southern...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

I've thought a lot about how to define the word "gene." It's clear that no definition will capture all the possibilities b...

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...

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...

This post is mostly about a recent paper published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biol & Biomed Sci where two philosophers pre...

Charles Darwin , the greatest scientist who ever lived, was born on this day in 1809 [ Darwin still spurs tributes, debates ] [ Happy Darwin...

The term "Function Wars" refers to the debate over the meaning of 'function,' especially in the context of junk DNA. 1 Th...

A group of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, NM, USA) and their collaborators in Vienna (Austria) and Lethbridge...

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