Tag: Genetics

Gene Networks and Natural Selection

This was originally posted at Adaptive Complexity, but it might be of interest to our patrons here at The Finch and Pea.

Life can be brutal for yeast in the wild. You don’t know where your next meal is coming from or what form it’s going to take. The key to being a successful yeast is to be metabolically agile, able to switch your metabolic state quickly based on the food source that’s currently available on the bark of an oak tree or in the leaf litter of a forest floor.

So yeast, especially the set of species related to baker’s yeast, have various networks of genes that specialize in making a meal out of different sugars. A yeast has to detect, pump in, and break down various sugars like sucrose, galactose, maltose, and glucose. Each of these sugars has different chemical properties, and therefore yeast requires different sensors, transporters, and enzymes to use each as a food source. Continue reading “Gene Networks and Natural Selection”

ESP and genetics

…not what you think. Electronic Scholarly Publishing: esp.org. (How nice to see that domain name devoted to real science.)

The ESP site is dedicated to the electronic publishing of scientific and other scholarly materials. Of particular interest are the history of science, genetics, computational biology, and genome research.

Check out their papers on the foundations of classical genetics, from Aristotle to Malthus, Morgan, and Muller.

(Hat tip to UC Berkeley’s Brad DeLong and his history of econ course.)

Happy Birthday, Gregor!

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)
Image via Wikipedia

On this day in 1822, Gregor Mendel was born. Forty-three years later he would give birth to genetics when he reported his discovery of the laws of inheritance from pea hybridization experiments. It took about forty more years for his work to be rediscovered and applied.

 

The Finch and Pea is half-named in honor of Mendel’s pea hybridization experiments. The discovery of genetics combined with Darwin’s ideas about evolution form the foundation of modern biology (along with molecular methods from physics – but they do not have a model organism that makes a cool pub-y name).

Happy 189th Birthday, Gregor! You look great.

 

 

 

In the Beginning. . .or Icky Genesis Genetics

1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
– Genesis 1:1-2 (King James Version – KJV)

And then he made humans, at least twice-ish[1]. Embarrassingly, he seemed to only make one family, which meant that when it came time for Adam and Eve’s son, Cain[2], to go looking for a bride, he was not going to go looking very far from home.

If you are not descended from a line of Egyptian pharaohs, now is the time to say “EWWW!” and start wondering why all of humanity doesn’t look like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Continue reading “In the Beginning. . .or Icky Genesis Genetics”

Gene Logic: Finding your (micro)Identity

The secret to success in life is to find your identity, particularly if you are a cell. Achieving and holding an identity is the prime concern of life at its most fundamental, cellular level; it is the key to engaging in behavior which best meets the challenges and demands of the molecular thicket that is the environment of the cell. Life can downright bewildering on the micron level. An identity makes this world navigable. Identity determines how a cell looks, what it eats, and the company it keeps. It specifies what environmental signals can be received, and what responses those signals elicit. An E. coli bacterium metabolizing a favorite monosaccharide in your gut, a yeast cell looking to hook up with one of the opposite gender, a nerve cell in your brain primed for an electric response, that light-detecting rod cell in your retina, the myocyte harboring a molecular power train in your bicep, and a cancer cell gone rogue: each of these has at its core an identity that dictates its behavior.
Continue reading “Gene Logic: Finding your (micro)Identity”