I am not that surprised really, that is what natural selection is about. The DNA coding for many genes also has quite a bit of redundancy built in, naturally with large radiation doses critical genes may be damaged, but given enough time favourable mutants will arise.
It reminds me of the large scale experiments done on plant breeding [1] where radioactive material was placed in the centre of a field of crops, and favourable mutants were selected. I love telling this story to anti-GE people, who probably eat plant products produced as a result of these experiments done predominantly in the 1970's. At least with GE only a single well studied change is being made.
I have to say these are a fantastic idea. Kudos to you and team on this one Taco, I look forward to new innovations. It is too easy to be critcal all the time (dupes, mod point abuse ect..)
Interesting idea, but when you prepare SEM samples, they often shrivel up a bit.
They are about the right size though, these particles range in size from 4 to 10 m. And human RBCs are about 6-8 m. It would explain the lack of a nucleus and DNA too.
But the TEM images are all wrong (thick "cell wall"), and the low Iron and high silicon content makes it very suspect too.
Spock's blood?
But seriously I hope they send some of these things over to other labs for investigation (like mine!) I would start with universal primers, PCR can amplify the tiniest amount of DNA, all they did was dunk the `cells' in Edithium bromide.
We got Firefly here in New Zealand earlier this year, and I finally got to see what all you American Slashdotters were raving about. I enjoyed it, pity it was on so late at night.
Now I wonder how long it will take the movie to get here. No spoilers please!!
Yeah, but then there will be even more anons making stupid changes I have to revert. Todays favorite was someone (159.134.149.2) who added "ffffuuuuucccccccckkkkkkkkk bbbbbbbbaaaaaaaccccccctttttttteeeeerrrrrrrriiiaa" to Aquificae.
Sorry about not explaining 16S, you become quite insular during a PhD.
16S rRNA is widely used in bacterial taxonomy, and has been for a very long time, even before sequencing was available (as restriction patterns - fingerprints). Wiki on non-coding RNA
The homologue in human cells is 18S rRNA, however the rRNA in mitochondria in our cells is 16S, as mitochondria and bacteria share a common ancestor.
Side note: I am so used to Wikipedia I started linking like [[this]].
I agree with you next point, maybe I could secure more funding by linking into an international project such as this.
Given the information in the Wiki you referred to, wouldn't you say that the barcodes could provide a starting point for good taxonomy projects?
Yes it could well be, but it would be a "fishing expidition" you may well find nothing of significant interest. Spending dollars on focused projects is probably more useful.
My concern over funding really relates to New Zealand where we have a very restricted research budget. Moving dollars to barcoding would mean that people will actually loose jobs (we are currently going through a major funding round, and some peoples' projects have been axed).
The fragment of DNA that they are sequencing is located on the mitochondria and is part of the cytochrome c oxidase gene (COI). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcode
I am a taxonomist and can tell you this is of limited usefulness, sure we will be able to see some differences between organisms, but this is already done is many studies with the control region of the mitochondria.
The problem could be if people just rely on these sequences alone to delineate species, we learnt this years ago in bacterial taxonomy that you simply cannot rely on any one particular gene (There is evidence of horizontal gene transfer in 16S genes if someone was going to counter with that).
A speciation event is driven by some environmental pressure (change in temperature say). The genes that are under selection of this pressure will change at different rates to one under no direct pressure (COI).
I could rant on but, I think this project is of some use only if combined with traditional taxonomy. The danger is that a large flashy project like this will steal research dollars away from traditional taxonomy.
I have been using 1.8a5 for a while now, it is very stable (1.8a1 screwed things up for me).
I do have a complaint about Moz Mail though, it wants to display my entire headers for emails, which are huge. I have kept the same profile so I don't know why this should change.
I prefer Mozilla over firefox, mostly I guess since I have used Mox since M13, and I am used to the way it works, such as shortcuts and the search bar.
I wish more extentions worked with Mozilla though.
The 50-100 infections the zealot is talking about are most probably cookies. Adaware and Spybot count each cookie as a seperate spyware. Of course, they only look at IE's cookies, not Firefox's.
Unfortunately still have to use IE at work, but working on that.:(.
Yeah I am supposed to too, but just find some case where IE simply does not allow you to do your job. For me it was downloading, saving and searching pages with lots of genome data Which IE couldn't handle.
I have been using Mozilla consistantly since M13. It works perfectly.
I see his URL has changed from radio.weblogs.com to www.primidi.com too. This happened some time between October 30th and November 3rd. see his submissions.
Slashdot Mirror
I disabled sigs three years ago, then turned them on just now to see what he was on about. Looks like I havent missed much.
Results from one of my papers: http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/70/10/5980
This text had been classified as
AUTHENTIC
with a 95.2% chance of being an authentic paper
Whew!!, cool maybe I'll pass the turing test too.
I am not that surprised really, that is what natural selection is about. The DNA coding for many genes also has quite a bit of redundancy built in, naturally with large radiation doses critical genes may be damaged, but given enough time favourable mutants will arise.
It reminds me of the large scale experiments done on plant breeding [1] where radioactive material was placed in the centre of a field of crops, and favourable mutants were selected. I love telling this story to anti-GE people, who probably eat plant products produced as a result of these experiments done predominantly in the 1970's. At least with GE only a single well studied change is being made.
[1] http://www.nias.affrc.go.jp/eng/gfs/index.html
Well I found this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/palm2ical/
Written in Java, I'll give it a go.
Oh please somebody hack this, then I will as happy as the day GLM came out.
Off topic, but it fascinates me how many molecular biologists / microbiologists are on slashdot (myself included).
Their theory of its small size, is a lack of minerals in the habitat (Specifically Calcium I guess), that limits the avalible bone making material.
I have to say these are a fantastic idea. Kudos to you and team on this one Taco, I look forward to new innovations. It is too easy to be critcal all the time (dupes, mod point abuse ect..)
This is an excellent step forward.
OK so that was micrometres not metres, I guess slash does not like unicode mu symbols.
Interesting idea, but when you prepare SEM samples, they often shrivel up a bit.
They are about the right size though, these particles range in size from 4 to 10 m. And human RBCs are about 6-8 m. It would explain the lack of a nucleus and DNA too.
But the TEM images are all wrong (thick "cell wall"), and the low Iron and high silicon content makes it very suspect too.
Spock's blood?
But seriously I hope they send some of these things over to other labs for investigation (like mine!) I would start with universal primers, PCR can amplify the tiniest amount of DNA, all they did was dunk the `cells' in Edithium bromide.
And I was amazed when I heard the Aussies were claiming the Kiwi Pav as their own!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlova Wikipedia is a little more neutral, but the earliest evidence is on the kiwi side.
Well, I think you should care, But I salute you for using the correct phrase: "couldn't care less".
People writing "could care less", when they mean the opposite, infuriates me more than goatse links.
We got Firefly here in New Zealand earlier this year, and I finally got to see what all you American Slashdotters were raving about. I enjoyed it, pity it was on so late at night.
Now I wonder how long it will take the movie to get here. No spoilers please!!
I guess it must be true then
Is the English of that article painfully jolting to any one else? I couldn't finish it.
no popups in Mozilla 1.8a6
(fresh install no adblock)
Yeah, but then there will be even more anons making stupid changes I have to revert. Todays favorite was someone (159.134.149.2) who added "ffffuuuuucccccccckkkkkkkkk bbbbbbbbaaaaaaaccccccctttttttteeeeerrrrrrrriiiaa" to Aquificae.
Hey, stop picking on the little guy!
Sorry about not explaining 16S, you become quite insular during a PhD.
16S rRNA is widely used in bacterial taxonomy, and has been for a very long time, even before sequencing was available (as restriction patterns - fingerprints). Wiki on non-coding RNA
The homologue in human cells is 18S rRNA, however the rRNA in mitochondria in our cells is 16S, as mitochondria and bacteria share a common ancestor.
Side note: I am so used to Wikipedia I started linking like [[this]].
I agree with you next point, maybe I could secure more funding by linking into an international project such as this.
Reference for 16S HGT
Yes it could well be, but it would be a "fishing expidition" you may well find nothing of significant interest. Spending dollars on focused projects is probably more useful.
My concern over funding really relates to New Zealand where we have a very restricted research budget. Moving dollars to barcoding would mean that people will actually loose jobs (we are currently going through a major funding round, and some peoples' projects have been axed).
The fragment of DNA that they are sequencing is located on the mitochondria and is part of the cytochrome c oxidase gene (COI). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcode
I am a taxonomist and can tell you this is of limited usefulness, sure we will be able to see some differences between organisms, but this is already done is many studies with the control region of the mitochondria.
The problem could be if people just rely on these sequences alone to delineate species, we learnt this years ago in bacterial taxonomy that you simply cannot rely on any one particular gene (There is evidence of horizontal gene transfer in 16S genes if someone was going to counter with that).
A speciation event is driven by some environmental pressure (change in temperature say). The genes that are under selection of this pressure will change at different rates to one under no direct pressure (COI).
I could rant on but, I think this project is of some use only if combined with traditional taxonomy. The danger is that a large flashy project like this will steal research dollars away from traditional taxonomy.
Thanks for that informative link to Slashdot on the Slashdot home page. Now I know how to get to Slashdot to read the news.
I have been using 1.8a5 for a while now, it is very stable (1.8a1 screwed things up for me).
I do have a complaint about Moz Mail though, it wants to display my entire headers for emails, which are huge. I have kept the same profile so I don't know why this should change.
I prefer Mozilla over firefox, mostly I guess since I have used Mox since M13, and I am used to the way it works, such as shortcuts and the search bar.
I wish more extentions worked with Mozilla though.
--
Blog
Spybot can see Mozilla / Firefox cookies.
Yeah I am supposed to too, but just find some case where IE simply does not allow you to do your job. For me it was downloading, saving and searching pages with lots of genome data Which IE couldn't handle.
I have been using Mozilla consistantly since M13. It works perfectly.
I see his URL has changed from radio.weblogs.com to www.primidi.com too. This happened some time between October 30th and November 3rd. see his submissions.
Another URL for my hosts file.