lpetrich

Also, Science magazine has a nice article on the recently-sequenced genome of the malaria-carrying mosquito Anopheles gambiae. And Nature magazine has an article on the genome of the protozoan that causes malaria, Plasmodium falciparum.

There are some interesting illustrations of evolutionary principles in these articles.

My favorite is how surface proteins of P. falciparum have much more variety than interior proteins, which suggests a multiple-target strategy for evading host immune systems. This would be like why Human Leukocyte Antigens and similar proteins in other species are strongly polymorphic -- what makes organ transplants difficult is also what makes it difficult for a parasite to select the "right" molecular disguise for itself.

Also, this microbe has a vestigial chloroplast that is retained only because it does some lipid synthesis.

There is also evidence that A. gambiae is splitting up into two species -- there are two genetic variants that correlate with different choices of larval habitats.

There were even some comparisons of how many genes were recognizably present in different genomes, comparing mosquito, fruit fly, human, mouse, nematode, yeast, and plant genomes. Not surprisingly, the mosquito had the most genes in common with the fruit fly.

[ October 04, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>