We just finished the first session of the book “Origins of Evolutionary Innovations” by A. Wagner, on Chapter 1.
Click on “Continue Reading” to see a resume of this chapter.
book club on “Origins of Evolutionary Innovations” by A. Wagner
I am organizing a discussion club on the book “Origins of Evoutionary Innovations” by A. Wagner, for my group.
Well, I don’t promise anything, but since I will do the effort of producing some presentations anyway, I will also publish all the slides here in this blog.
This book describes how new phenotypes are discovered in evolution. In the first chapter, it starts by describing some examples of notable phenotypes that have appeared, such as the Urea cycle and the ability to use glucose as a carbon source. But in general, this book is about how any novel phenotype appears in evolution.
It also explains the concepts of genotype space and genotype network, and how much variability can a population of organisms withstand without having changes in a given phenotype. For example, there are far more possible mRNAs than the number of proteins observed, so it seems that any given protein can be produced by more than one mRNA. This means that an organism can withstand many changes to its DNA, without suffering changes to the structure of the protein. What is the role of this variability in evolution?
There is also a nice paper published on the topic today, in Science: Meyer JR et al, Repeatability and Contingency in the Evolution of a Key Innovation in Phage Lambda, Science 2012.
The book club will take place only in my lab, but if you are interested, you can follow the slides and comment on this blog. (or would it be better to discuss it on Twitter? Let’s use the #evol_innov_book tag on twitter). Enjoy!
Programming for Evolutionary Biology Course – Leipzig 2012
This year I will teach in a two-week Introductory course to Programming and Bioinformatics, aimed at PhD students and Post-Docs working in Evolutionary Biology. This is a course designed for researchers that have little or no experience with programming, and it will teach them the basics of Bash, Perl, R Programming along with popular tools used in Evolutionary Biology.
The deadline for application is January 31st 2012, and the course will be held in Leipzig (Germany) in the last two weeks of March 2012. Please check the home page of the course for details on how to apply:
We tried to keep the cost of the course as low as possible, and thanks to a contribution from the Volkswagen foundation we have been able to keep it at only 300 euros for person. Plus, we have some fellowships available.
Here it is the programme, that you can also find in the home page of the course:
- Introduction to Linux (Giovanni Marco Dall’Olio, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain)
- Introduction to R (Katja Nowick, University Leipzig, Germany)
- Analysis of next generation sequencing data (Tomas Marques-Bonet, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain)
- Analysis of structural variants (Tomas Marques-Bonet, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain)
- Analysis of expression data (Katja Nowick, University Leipzig, Germany)
- Promoter evolution (Annalisa Marsico, Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany)
- Statistics & Inference (Stuart Baird, University Porto, Portugal)
- Introduction to Perl (Sofia Robb, University of California Riverside, USA)
- Phylogenomics (Rui Faria, University Porto, Portugal)
- Ensembl API (Bert Overduin, EMBL – European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK)
- Introduction to databases (Jan Aerts, Leuven University, Belgium)
- Visualization of scientific data (Jan Aerts, Leuven University, Belgium)
Invited speakers:
- Evolution of behavior (Sarah London, University of Chicago, USA)
- Evolutionary ecology (Claudia Acquisti, Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster, Germany)
- Phylogenomics (Rasmus Nielsen, University of California, Berkeley, USA)