funniest paragraph in Graur et al - Brenner's distinction between junk and garbage...

To deal with the confusion in the literature, we propose to refresh the memory of those objecting to “junk DNA” by repeating a 15-year old terminological distinction made by Brenner (1998), who astutely differentiated between “junk DNA,” one the one hand, and “garbage DNA,” on the other: “Some years ago I noticed that there are two kinds of rubbish in the world and that most languages have different words to distinguish them. There is the rubbish we keep, which is junk, and the rubbish we throw away, which is garbage. The excess DNA in our genomes is junk, and it is there because it is harmless, as well as being useless, and because the molecular processes generating extra DNA outpace those getting rid of it. Were the extra DNA to become disadvantageous, it would become subject to selection, just as junk that takes up too much space, or is beginning to smell, is instantly converted to garbage … ”.

amazing critique of encode

http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.evt028.full.pdf

also see this interview of lead author grauer and mike eisen, who has some interesting comments on encode and the failure of our govt to push open source publishing

http://www.mendelspod.com/podcast/debating-encode-with-dan-graur-and-michael-eisen

Umut Eser's thesis available to download

Click here to download Umut's thesis on the timing of cell cycle transcription​. Congratulations again to Umut, who will be joining Stirling Churman's Harvard lab in the summer (after finishing the remaining two papers...)

Devon Chandler-Brown joins the lab!

Big news day. Devon Chandler-Brown joins the lab. We are very excited to have him join us to work on the mechanisms underlying timing differences in cell cycle transcription, and how spatial organization, driven by chromatin structure may play an important role... the nucleus is far from a well mixed bag, which has functional consequences.​

Franklin win's Dean's award for significant achievement by an undergraduate!

Franklin wins the dean's award for a significant achievement by an undergraduate. This was for work done with Jon Payne and myself on the relationship between protist adult and offspring sizes. It turns out there is a limited range of offspring size for a given adult size, which increases monotonically with adult size. Excellent data! It will be a nice paper likely to appear in the journal Evolution in 2013. Again, congratulations to Franklin - now he just needs to finish his senior thesis on yeast size control ...​