Some interesting things in Science & Nature from 18 Nov. '10 to 11 Feb. '11

Here's some things I found interesting from Science & Nature (and their podcasts) from 18 Nov. '10 to 11 Feb. '11.

Science

* A survey of microbiomes in different organisms shows that

phylogenetic relatedness trumps environment and diet in terms of

predicting the similarity of gut microbes (3 Dec.)

* Denoeud et al. "Plasticity of Animal Genome Architecture Unmasked by Rapid Evolution of a Pelagic Tunicate" (3 Dec., http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6009/1381.full). Quoting: "Two distinct haplotypes were retained, despite inbreeding."

* In Dec. 10 Science, there's an interesting paper related to yo-yo dieting, showing that mice on such a diet have high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone ("Thought for Food: Imagined Consumption Reduces Actual Consumption").

* Interesting story in 10 Dec. Science about using sensitive DNA
sequencing -- to identify fish populations and to analyze fetal DNA
directly from blood ("To Fight Illegal Fishing, Forensic DNA Gets Local").

* In 28 Jan. Science there's an interesting discussion of an infective cancer in dogs and
differences found in clustering the dog breeds vs the cancers.

* The water flea genome has lots of duplications, which appear to diverge quickly in terms of gene expression (Colbourne et al. "The Ecoresponsive Genome of Daphnia pulex,"4 Feb.).

* 11 Feb. Science was the "Data Issue," which contained a good lead article on personal genomics and ethics of consent (Couzin-Frankel, "What Would You Do?"). Another article on scaling of data was also very interesting (Martin Hilbert & Priscila López, "The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information," 1 Apr.).

Nature & misc.

* An interesting paper on dev. biology: Kalinka et al. "Gene expression divergence recapitulates the developmental hourglass model," Nature 468: 811

* Great article illustrating the bias in the selection of protein sets chosen -- in contrast to the situation for genes!
Edwards et al. "Too many roads not taken," Nature (13 Feb.)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7333/full/470163a.html

* Here's an interesting article in Curr. Biology where
the authors developed a way to determine the age of a human DNA sample via
analyzing a particular section of DNA excised in T-cells. There's less and less as we get older.
http://promega.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/analyzing-dna-to-determine-a-person%E2%80%99s-age/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21093786

[[* Scinatpodfeb11 *]]