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First Complete Lizard Genome Sequenced
iamrmani writes with an article in the International Business Times about the recent gene sequencing of a lizard. From the article: "Researchers have managed to sequence the genes of the green anole lizard, which is the first non-bird species of reptile to have its genome sequenced and assembled. The findings, which researchers have obtained after assembling and analyzing more than 20 mammalian genomes, may go a long way in understanding the evolution of animals and humans."
Jurassic Park, here we come! Bring on the Velociraptors!!
Lounges across the world have become that must less mysterious.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The first non-bird species of reptile? I've heard that it is also the first non-mammal species of reptile to have its genome sequenced. Seriously though, the Slashdot summary may sound stupid (shocking, I know) but the story is actually quite interesting. Of course this is not something to read about in the International Business Times! There is a much better article in Scientific American: Lizard Genome Unveiled: First non-avian reptile sequence helps explain vertebrate evolution by Lee Sweetlove. Highly recommended reading. I also recommend this article on PhysOrg: First lizard genome sequenced by Haley Bridger. Ths story is particularly remarkable that when we have successfully sequenced the genomes of the entire line of the fish - reptile - bird - mammal evolution then we will finally be able to prove the theory even beyond any reasonable doubt of intelligent designers. Hopefully this breakthrough will start an interesting discussion in the world of science about the exact details of the natural selection in general and the speciation in particular.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
they're dinosaurs. the *warm bloodedness* and *feathers*
should have been tiny little hints.
doesn't anybody watch dinosaur train?
We now to see how closely the sequence aligns with the Queen of England's genome.
When did we get these?
Never happened. True story.
that have had their genome sequenced.
Seriously, you couldn't find an article written by someone who reached the second grade* as the link for something that is actually interesting.
* No really, one of the pages in the crappy 2nd grade activity book the kid did last week (aimed at those entering 2nd grade) was categorizing some animals as either reptile, bird, mammal, or fish.
Researchers have managed to sequence the genes of the green anole lizard, which is the first non-bird species of reptile to have its genome sequenced
I know my taxonomy knowledge is weak, but... Birds are considered reptiles? I mean, I accept that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that they are currently considered reptiles? That's new.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
..welcome our new genetically sequenced lizard overloads!
--fatboy
I need to get in touch with the British scientists who create Hybrid Human-Animal DNA, so I can be the first Dr. Curt Connors.
TFA discusses how having this genome may help us better understand evolution by getting a better picture of how different reptile species diverged and how exactly they diverged from mammals. One of the neatest aspect of this research are the discovery of a large number of transposons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposon. These are segments of DNA which can jump around the genome inserting themselves where they please. They can be disruptive or helpful or just do weird things (in fact they were initially discovered in corn when Barbara McClinctock was trying to figure out what controlled the very strange behavior of corn coloration) . As TFA discusses, some of the same transposons in the lizard genome also exist in humans but many have been tamed and put to productive use.
Too bad they aren't taking requests for which lizards to sequence. I'd be very interesting in the sequencing of the New Mexico whiptail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_whiptail in the hope that its weird reproductive behavior might be better understood. The whiptail has evolved to be an all female species. The females reproduce in a way that does shuffle their own genes so that children aren't complete clones. But one really neat detail is that they need to engage in mock sexual behavior in order to reproduce. If they don't hump each other they won't produce eggs. This is has earned them the nickname "lesbian lizards". They are not the only species that has adopted this sort of process but it is very rare, and the whiptail is one of the better understood examples. I would hope that having the full genome might give us more insight into how/why this sort of thing can evolve.
More pessimistically, there's been very little direct benefit from finding species complete genomes. While the human genome project has provided some benefits most of those benefits have been fairly subtle. It seems that the human genome project has been helpful but not nearly as much as some people predicted. Some of the modern genetic work uses techniques developed during the genome project but much doesn't seem to actually use the human genome project data itself.
Some of these comments are isomorphic to this review of Richard Dawkin's history of your family tree:
http://creation.com/review-the-ancestors-tale-richard-dawkins
2: implement it for people having lost a member
3: profit
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
So until now we've only sequenced incomplete lizard genomes? I wonder which one of the nuts at /. who tried his hands on English grammar this time.
Following up on their results, the researchers also claim to pinpoint the Gecko lizard's origins to New Zealand.
So according to some nutters we now have the Gnome for the Royal family and the Freemasons :)
How will this tell us what makes up the Republican congressman genome?
And how we can cure it?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
See (for instance):
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/hall_tour/spectrum/non_flash_index.html
This isn't about an imposed classification, it is about a family tree. Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than either are to snakes. Snakes are more closely related to birds than either are to turtles.
That is, these guys:
http://www.wolaver.org/animals/crocodile-plover.jpg
share a *much* more recent common ancestor than these two:
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/02/images/salamander-pgoebeil.jpg
and:
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090630160120/uncyclopedia/images/2/2f/Geico-gecko.jpg
You are more closely related to a goldfish than the goldfish is to a shark:
http://rlv.zcache.com/goldfish_bowl_tshirt-p23514656184174989535jn_400.jpg
http://bit.ly/nknQ00
If dinosaurs are birds that means dinosaurs are not reptiles. Sorry dude reptiles and birds share as much in common as mammals and birds. The statement above is total nonsense.
I think it's more like :
Birds come from dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are reptiles.
Thus the "first non-bird species of reptile".
That is the first real reptile as we usually classify them.
My 2ct...
Queue? Is that a mistranslation from some other language?
I've seen Spider-man Comic books that started this way.... right before Dr. Conners turns into a 7 foot Lizard. PANIC!
As far as I know, no complete genome sequence exists for any eukaryote. That is because NGS techniques use very short reads, and thus it's impossible to tell e.g. how long some repeat regions truly are.
Spanish, probably. "Tail" and "queue" both translate to "cola"
How did you get to the Queen? Was it because of the line in the Scientific American article saying that anoles may be atypical and that "It will be illuminating to compare it with more conservative lizards"?
I'd been thinking of Newt Gingrich, myself.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One of the comments above points to an article in Scientific American which explains the issues better than the business newspaper. That article quotes biologist Susan Evans saying that anoles may be atypical and "It will be illuminating to compare it with more conservative lizards - not to mention representatives of a wider range of reptiles such as snakes, tuatara, crocodiles and turtles." Whiptails might be quite interesting, but they sound like they're definitely atypical.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, he is a newt (I know, not actually a lizard)
That is how it goes in a second grade level explanation or evolution.
That's the problem with second grade. It's a simplification to make the data accessible to second graders. It doesn't take into account more complex knowledge that we have acquired since then.
Oh, and by the way, atoms aren't small collection of beads orbiting each other. That's also a school-science simplification that fails to take into account wave functions and all such wonders.
All these is what some name "lies-to-children"
Don't get me wrong: There's nothing inherently bad in using simplification. You just have to keep in mind that they are model. And as with any model in since, it has its domain of application. (You can use newtonian physics for everyday motions, you only need to whip out Einstein's models for bigger speeds).
Your second grade teacher didn't make a mistake by teaching this, but made a mistake by failing to specify that this is a coarse model and pupils with special interests are encourage to study more details if they wish.
BUT BIRDS ARE NOT REPTILES reptiles do not have feathers, are cold blooded and have a three chambered heart.
If you use that over-simplified definition yes.
Except that, since then, people have also looked on evolution markers. Apparitions of small characteristics, small anatomical differences, physiology, mutation in DNA, and much more.
What arises there is that Mammals split apart from reptiles pretty early one.
Reptiles split further later on, with avians emerging quite late.
In fact, there are much less difference between avians and some reptiles, as there is difference between reptiles.
If you want to lump turtles, crocodiles and lizards in the same "reptile" class, you end up with a definition so broad of "reptiles", and a position so early in the evolution tree, that you need to lump dinosaurs and birds in the same class too (and only miss lumping mammals too by a hairbreadth. We split appart a tiny little bit earlier).
That's why the lizard is defined as a non-avian reptile.
- It's also a "reptile" according to these new evolutionary biology discoveries. But due to how broad this definition has become, it could also mean "birds" or "avian reptiles". And we already have several genomes of those (turkey was sequenced for research because of its agricultural significance, for exemple)
- They have to specify "non-avian reptile" to what people commonly refer as "reptile" (using simplified 2nd grade biology) : lizards, turtles, and the like.
So the phrase makes perfectly sense to anyone using more complex models of phylogeny, and only sounds silly to someone using simplified 2nd grader models.
The 2nd grader explanation rely only on a few big characteristics, and might lump together things that remotely look alike but in fact aren't that related.
Case in point : the number of heart chambers.
On might be quick to separate bird and mammals on one side, and non-avian reptiles on the other as the former have 4 chambers and the later only 3 (mostly). Well, turns out there are several different way to "invent" a 4 chambered hearts. The fact that both birds and mammals have them isn't due to common ancestry, but due to convergent evolution: Once you have a 3-chambered hearth, the next best step in improving the oxygen pumping efficiency is to evolve 4 chambers to separate oxygenate and non-oxygenated blood.
But "birds" got their "4-chamber heart" in a slightly different way. In fact their hearts are assembled "the other way arround" when you look into some details: our left aorta pumps fresh blood to the body. In birds it's the right. When we created walls to separate the two circulations (lungs and body), we didn't do it the same way around. Proof that our hearts were invented by evolution at separate points of time.
So number of hearth chambers might work as a quick rule of the thumb. But starts to fall apart when you need more details. And when you start looking into the exact DNA text, oh boy you what a detailed model you need.
By the way: Crocodiles have 4 chambered hearth too.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you want to lump turtles, crocodiles and lizards in the same "reptile" class, you end up with a definition so broad of "reptiles", and a position so early in the evolution tree, that you need to lump dinosaurs and birds in the same class too (and only miss lumping mammals too by a hairbreadth. We split appart a tiny little bit earlier).
Nice wikipedia picture
We (mammals) are down the "Synapsid" branch. And as the the green blob suggest, we might almost be lumped with classic "reptiles" too (because this definition covers some of our oldest direct ancestors)
Birds are a small, small sub branch on the right hand of the diagram
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's a reference to David Icke. Not content with his lot as a BBC sports commentator, he declared himself the son of god, and proclaimed that the Queen of England is infact a lizard. Makes sense I guess. Given a choice between people thinking I was insane, or thinking I liked football, I'd go for insane too...
Intelligent Design says that yeah, ok, something like evolution obviously did happen, but it wasn't an accident, it was a sequence of pre-planned steps by an intelligent designer Whose identity we'll pretend to be open-minded about. Genetic evidence of evolution just shows that He was reusing code and parts from animals He built first instead of magically creating them by fiat. (That doesn't mean that their motivations or methods are actually scientific, of course, but they're mainly trying to explain science in ways that leave loopholes for religion to still be true.)
That's different from hardcore evolution skeptics, who typically are literalists about the stories in Genesis or at least don't want to believe humans aren't really special. (Most of them are either Protestant Christians or else Muslims, but there are also non-Judaism-based religions whose followers don't like evolution.)
That's also different from the US right-wing political opposition to evolution. It's primarily there to keep the Protestant religious conservatives locked in to political conservatism, by pushing buttons that are easy to push, just as the Democrats use the abortion issue to keep feminists locked in to the Democratic Party and the Republicans use it to keep conservative Protestants locked in to the Republican Party and to try to steal the Catholics from the Democrats. But secondarily it's there to promote opposition to science, because the Republicans' corporate sponsors really don't want the public believing that Global Warming is a problem that needs to be solved by legislation, in ways that are bad for oil companies and agribusiness, and that means pushing the Don't Trust Science agenda every way they can. You'd expect rural conservatives to also be conservationists, especially after the Dust Bowl, and they really don't want that kind of attitude around. Drill, Baby, Drill!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sorry dude reptiles and birds share as much in common as mammals and birds.
And (some) reptiles and birds share much more in common than corcodiles, turtles and lizards.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This is great! Maybe we can custom design some lizards that eat only cockroaches and bedbugs and are litter box trained.
Should be a great revenue opportunity,
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Hm... I don't see how I've misunderstood the ID folks. In my mind, they are among the "fence-sitters" I mentioned. You have described it in much more detail than my short post, but I don't think we disagree on the basics.
Ultimately I think it's a generational thing. The younger folks tend to be more open to evolution, just as they are more open to equal rights for gays. The main difference between these two issues is that young people tend to personally know more gays than their parents and grandparents, whereas "awareness" of evolution is more dependent on education which, sadly, has been declining in recent years.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The taxon Dinosauria was formally named in 1842 by Sir Richard Owen, who used it to refer to the "distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles"
Learn to use Wikipedia before you post.
Oh, right, that's familiar. (Sorry for the America-centric viewpoint that thinks we have a monopoly on crazy people....)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't think I agree on the generational thing - I'm from the boomer generation, and got a decent amount of evolution and genetics education in high school, though over the last few decades evolution has become more and more important in biology and genetics (even if it doesn't always show up at the high school biology level.) But I'm also from the Northeast, not the South.
Also, the hippie generation were into ecology - I'm not sure if city kids get that as much, and more people are in cities these days. On the other hand, we couldn't do DNA sequencing in our kitchens or high school biology classes back then.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I just pray to God that we're still evolving!
Have the sequenced any incomplete lizards?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!