… in a developmental biology paper, I’m going to have to start breaking things.
This is almost as bad as referring to the collection of genomic data as the “canonical ensemble” approach. (FYI, Wikipedia: “canonical ensemble”)
I would like to know, when is a response to a morphogen gradient not considered an emergent property?
…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.)
Titles of the references on the Hawaiian earring Wikipedia page, clearly designed to make math actually seem fun:
“The big fundamental group, big Hawaiian earrings, and the big free groups”
“Anomalous behavior of the Hawaiian earring group”
“The fundamental groups of one-dimensional wild spaces and the Hawaiian earring”
“The singular homology of the Hawaiian earring”
“The topological Hawaiian earring group does not embed in the inverse limit of free groups”
Needless to say (but I’m going to anyway), I am pleased as punch that my lab’s most recent offering unto the body of scientific literature (“Analysis of alternative splicing associated with aging and neurodegeneration in the human brain”) was put on the cover of the current issue of Genome Research. In this paper, we investigated the connections between alternative splicing profiles in the aging brain and in brains suffering from neurodegenerative disorders, like Alzheimer’s disease. It is important to note that we were characterizing the alternative splicing differences associated with aging and disease, not identifying splicing changes that cause the diseases or the symptoms. Such questions will require ongoing work, which this study will, hopefully, help guide. Continue reading “Coming to news stands. . .”
PLoS Biology does point-counterpoint on whether our entire genomes are transcribed (and, by implication, whether the majority of our DNA is functional):
The Reality of Pervasive Transcription – Clark, et al.
Response – van Bakel, et al.
Interestingly, these two viewpoints tend to split somewhat cleanly between those who came into biology as computational people, and those who came in as experimentalists. (The split’s not perfect but the trend is there, and you can see it in the authorship of the two papers above.) Computational people (or, at least those who came in as computational people – I’m not making judgments about anyone’s experimental skills) are more likely to believe in pervasive transcription, and while others are more likely see it as experimental and biological noise.
Following the trend, I fall into the latter camp.
The Finch and Pea 