Registration and abstract submission are open for the 2nd ASM Conference on Experimental Microbial Evolution. The keynote address will be given by Richard Lenski, and plenary speakers include Shelley Copley, Michael Desai, Ivana Gudelj, and Bernhard Palsson.
Snowflake yeast, with apoptotic cells in red.
As part of their series on “Life’s Big Leaps,” Quanta Magazine has published an article about Will Ratcliff’s snowflake yeast research (“Life’s Secrets Sought in a Snowflake“).
On the second day of AbSciCon, members of the Ratcliff lab and I met with a reporter, Bob Holmes, from New Scientist. We had all given our talks on the first day of the meeting. The resulting article came out yesterday.
I’ve dealt with New Scientist before, and I find them among the better science news outlets. They make a real effort to understand the science behind their stories, a refreshing change from sites that slap misleading headlines onto barely reworded university press releases. Aaaand I’m going to wrap this up before it turns into a rant.
Peter Conlin, Jennifer Pentz, Bob Holmes, and Will Ratcliff enjoying some sushi in a Chicago park.
This is straight from the ALGAE-L listserv, but I thought it might be of interest:
PhD studentship: The ecology and evolution of multicellularity
A fully funded PhD position is available to work on evolutionary transitions to multicellularity. The student will work within the molecular ecology and evolution lab as well as the aquatic ecology group at the Department of Biology, Lund University.
Go to Sweden. Learn about multicellularity. Taste dank saké.
I am hiring a PhD student to study the evolutionary origins of multicellularity. Apply here https://t.co/Ef77E4WbQX
— Eric Libby (@SFI_elibby) December 11, 2018
Eric Libby is looking for a Ph.D. student to model the evolution of multicellularity at Umeå University in Sweden. Here’s the project description:
…”evolve” is not the correct term. The microbes adapted. – Cornelius Hunter
We heard several accusations during the recent Presidential campaign that one or the other candidate, or an interviewer, had taken a quote out of context. Of course, every quote is taken out of context. That’s what a quote is; otherwise it’s just the whole speech, or interview, or whatever. The important question is whether or not it’s taken out of context in a way that changes its meaning.
One thing I don’t do, and never have done, on this blog is intentionally misrepresent other people’s positions. The quote above, from a recent post by Cornelius Hunter on Evolution News and Views, means just what it says. He really is arguing that microbial adaptation observed in Lenski-style experiments is not evolution.
I’m attending the 2nd ASM Conference on Experimental Microbial Evolution (#ASMEME) in Washington, DC. The meeting opened last night with a keynote address by Rich Lenski on the long-term evolution experiment (LTEE). If you’re not familiar with it, the LTEE involves twelve populations of E. coli bacteria that have been transferred every damn day for the last 28 years. That’s right, twelve transfers every day since Ronald Reagan was President.
Since E. coli undergoes about 6.6 doublings per day under the experimental conditions, that means that the bacteria in this experiment have been evolving for over 65,000 generations. In that time, it has produced a wealth of information about evolutionary processes and spun out countless related experiments. The LTEE is so iconic that you usually don’t have to explain, at least to evolutionary biologists, which long-term evolution experiment you’re talking about. It has also played a role in some controversies, not least the “Lenski affair.”
This is taking much longer than I ever expected; hopefully I can get through blogging about Volvox 2015 before registration opens for Volvox 2017!
The final session on day 1 (August 20) was chaired by Aurora Nedelcu from the University of New Brunswick. Dr. Nedelcu’s introduction emphasized some of the basic questions in evolutionary biology, aside from the origins of multicellularity and sex, on which volvocine research has provided insights: the evolution of morphological innovations, the relative importance of cis-regulatory changes vs. protein-coding changes, kin vs. group selection as competing explanations for the evolution of altruism, the evolution of soma and of indivisibility, the genetic basis of cellular differentiation, and the role of antagonistic pleiotropy (my hastily scribbled notes seem to say “antagonistic pleiotropy of olsl.” Is that supposed to be rls1? This is the cost of waiting too long to write. Maybe Aurora can clarify.).
Chlamydomonas colonies from the predation experiment.
I’ll be giving a couple of talks on experimental evolution of multicellularity in the next couple of weeks:
Earlier this week, I wrote that fungi are weird. Fungi are also old. Probably.
Recently discovered fossils from Arctic Canada have been interpreted as fungi, an important finding since the sediments in which they were found date to 0.89-1.01 billion years ago, around half a billion years older than the next oldest unambiguously fungal fossils. Corentin Loron and colleagues have described microfossils from the Grassy Bay Formation and presented several lines of evidence that they represent ancient fungi.
Figure 1 a-g from Loron et al. 2019. Microphotographs of Ourasphaira giraldae specimens. a, Sketch of O. giraldae, displaying the main features of the microfossil. b–g, Unornamented terminal sphere (spore). Transmitted light microscopy images show specimens with secondary branching at a right angle (b, d–g), with terminal spheres connected together (c), with a bulbous connection (e) and with tertiary branching (d, f, g). Arrows show septate connections.