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Newly elected members of the GSA Board of Directors
GSA welcomes Barbara Meyer, Piali Sengupta, Jef Boeke, Hopi Hoekstra, and Mary Lou Guerinot to the Board of Directors! We are pleased to announce the election of new members to the GSA Board of Directors for 2017 and 2018: 2017 Vice-President & 2018 President Barbara Meyer, PhD (HHMI/University of California, Berkeley) Treasurer Piali Sengupta, PhD…
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Can gene drives survive in the wild?
Efforts to engineer genomes in wild populations have huge potential for good—but the real world is more complicated than the lab. Until now, humans have never been able to seriously consider how to cheat evolution. But now that the CRISPR/Cas9 system has made genome editing easy and efficient, it might be possible to manipulate the…
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Happy 150th to a fruit fly wrangler who changed the world
In Kentucky 150 years ago today, a child was born who would—with the help of a hardy inhabitant of trash cans and fruit bowls— grow up to change the world. That boy was Thomas Hunt Morgan. By the 1900s, the energetic young Morgan had become a well-respected expert investigating questions in experimental embryology and animal regeneration.…
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Leadership opportunities for postdocs
It’s National Postdoc Appreciation Week, which celebrates the vital contribution of postdoctoral scholars to advancing our understanding of the world. This week is the perfect time for lab heads to thank postdocs for all their hard work, for students to thank postdocs for their training and mentorship, and for everyone to thank postdocs for their…
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Not IF, we can help it
Perhaps no topic has had more ink spilled by biobloggers – especially if you include electrons dripping out of laptops – than the tyranny of the Journal Impact Factor. A metric designed by Eugene Garfield to help librarians select journals, the IF has been routinely abused for purposes never intended. How can we reverse this…
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Friendly dogs with floppy ears: The domestication syndrome
The mild temperament that distinguishes the family dog from its wolf ancestors is just one of a whole array of traits that seem to have evolved during domestication. Domestication syndrome refers to the suite of characteristics commonly observed in domestic animals, including docility, shorter muzzles, smaller teeth, smaller and floppier ears, and an altered estrous…
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Hubby & Lewontin: Problems and Conversations
The beautiful cover of the August issue of GENETICS was created by artist Michele Banks to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of a pivotal moment in the history of evolutionary biology: the 1966 publication of a pair of GENETICS papers using protein electrophoresis to reveal that natural genetic diversity is bountiful. Thanks to a conversation between…
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New in G3: coffee genome, dog diseases, and mouse infertility
Check out the September issue of G3! Investigations Retrotransposon Proliferation Coincident with the Evolution of Dioecy in Asparagus Alex Harkess, Francesco Mercati, Loredana Abbate, Michael McKain, J. Chris Pires, Tea Sala, Francesco Sunseri, Agostino Falavigna, and Jim Leebens-Mack G3 September 2016 6:2679-2685; Early Online June 24, 2016 doi:10.1534/g3.116.030239 Abstract | Full Text | Full Text…
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Kindred and KhoeSan: African ancestry is tied to ecogeography
Geography and ecology are key factors that have influenced the genetic makeup of human groups in southern Africa, according to new research discussed in the journal GENETICS, a publication of the Genetics Society of America. By investigating the ancestries of twenty-two KhoeSan groups, including new samples from the Nama and the ≠Khomani, researchers conclude that…
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September GENETICS Highlights
Check out the September issue of GENETICS by looking at the highlights or the full table of contents! ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS This Month’s Centennial Articles Sydney Brenner on the genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans, pp. 1-2 Bob Goldstein Associate Editor Bob Goldstein introduces the 1974 Classic reporting Sydney Brenner’s first Caenorhabditis elegans mutant screens, stimulating discoveries from thousands of researchers that…