Artificial jellyfish built from rat cells

A few months ago, we had a little seat-of-the-pants discussion of the (macro)evolution of CNS and sensory systems in arthropods.  If you want to follow up on that, here is a little review:

Evolving specialization of the arthropod nervous system

As many in our lab know, identifying homologous/orthologous genes in sister species is tedious process that even with decades of research, still generates vast uncertainty, which in turn, confounds downstream analyses (and is a pain to be honest).

Here are two recent papers that try to address the issue:

Domain enhanced lookup time accelerated BLAST

Prediction of Protein Domain with mRMR Feature Selection and Analysis

Another review in the last issue of NRG.  Mainly human/primate work.

“Focusing on work in primates, the authors discuss the evolution of gene expression, ways of exploring mechanisms that underlie expression changes and complementary work in model organisms on the functional effects of expression changes.”

A useful review in NRG. Includes an overview of different bioinformatic and experimental approaches, and a list of useful software and websites.

First there was a report of accelerated speciation in colour-polymorphic birds.  Now, a new paper from Ole Seehausen’s group finds a correlation between sexual dichromatism (a proxy for the intensity of sexual selection???) and the rate of species diversification in the famous African lake cichlids.