Month: September 2014
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Human genome was shaped by an evolutionary arms race with itself
By Tim Stephens, UCSC Public Information Office New findings by scientists at UC Santa Cruz suggest that an evolutionary arms race between rival elements within the genomes of primates drove the evolution of complex regulatory networks that orchestrate the activity of genes in every cell of our bodies. The arms race is between mobile DNA…
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UC Santa Cruz among top five institutions seeing growth in NIH funding
By Guy Lasnier, UCSC Public Information Office UC Santa Cruz is in the top five of institutions that have seen significant increases in funding from the National Institutes of Health over the past decade. At the same time a number of other institutions have suffered sizeable drops. According to “Science Squeezed,” a series of reports…
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Radical New DNA Sequencer Finally Gets into Researchers’ Hands
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review One day in 1989, biophysicist David Deamer pulled his car off California’s Interstate 5 to hurriedly scribble down an idea. In a mental flash, he had pictured a strand of DNA threading its way through a microscopic pore. Grabbing a pen and a yellow pad, he sketched out a…
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You cannot tell a book by looking at the cover: Cryptic complexity in bacterial evolution
Abstract: Do genetically closely related organisms under identical, but strong selection pressure converge to a common resistant genotype or will they diverge to different genomic solutions? This question gets at the heart of how rough is the fitness landscape in the local vicinity of two closely related strains under stress. We chose a Growth Advantage…