lpetrich

Over at <a href="http://gnn.tigr.org" target="_blank">the Genome News Network</a>, there is an article about the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, which can survive doses of ionizing radiation that are a thousand times the human lethal limit. How would such an ability evolve so quickly? The answer is that it did not have to. This bacterium resists dryness in very similar ways; dryness can cause similar genetic damage. And dryness has been around for much longer than big doses of ionizing radiation.

Thus this ability is an example of an exaptation or preadaptation.

Also at that site is news on work starting on the domestic-bovine genome; the work will initially be mapping that genome, and will eventually be moving on to sequencing it. Mapping the genome will be done with the assistance of the human genome, though there will be areas that may be difficult to match, such as the genes involved in making horns, making the stomach have four chambers, the cud-chewing instinct, and so forth.

Over at <a href="http://www.sanger.ac.uk" target="_blank">the Sanger Institute</a> is news of a draft version of the genome sequence of the malaria-carrying mosquito Anopheles gambiae. Which could help us understand why it is a carrier of the malaria protist instead of a victim.

That site also has a <a href="http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/syntenyview" target="_blank">human-mouse synteny map</a>, which graphically shows how parts of the two species' chromosomes map onto each other. And a large fraction of the human genome can be mapped onto the mouse genome, though that mapping is very scrambled.

As more genomes get mapped and sequenced, these rearrangements could provide additional information about evolution -- one could construct a family tree of genome rearrangements.

I checked some other places, but there wasn't anything else that seemed very new to me.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

scigirl

This is good news for our lab - we study specific cattle and human genes. It's interesting how much we can learn about human biology from comparing it to other completely different animals.

scigirl