Community Voices

The recent Brexit vote may initiate a break up of the European Union and a split in the United Kingdom. Violence and war is tearing apart the Middle East. Racial tensions are flaring up in the U.S. But in Florida two weeks ago, 3,000 model organism geneticists proved that separate communities not only can co-exist…

Guest post by Tyler Kent. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. Purging harmful mutations is the most common task of natural selection. In non-recombining populations this background selection process represents the “survival of the…

Guest post by the Alliance of Genome Resources. If you want to help the Alliance please take a short survey at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GSA-AllianceSurvey Six of the founding members of the Alliance of Genome Resources (Saccharomyces Genome Database, WormBase, FlyBase, Zebrafish Model Organism Database, Mouse Genome Database and the Gene Ontology Consortium) attended GSA’s The Allied Genetics…

Guest post by Julia Kreiner. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. A common perception of evolution sees only slow and consistent genetic change over thousands of generations. But geneticists are increasingly shedding light on…

#TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. Elbows, knuckles, and the other synovial joints in your body are mobile marvels of evolution. These joints allow a huge range of possible movements thanks to the presence of…

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Steven Zuryn Group Leader, Stafford Fox Senior Research Fellow Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Australiae Lab website Research program: One of our main…

One of Shakespeare’s First Folios was recently on loan from the Folger Library to Seattle, and my wife and I went to view it. You don’t have to be a theatre-lover to feel awestruck peering at the page opened at: “To be or not to be…” in a printing from Shakespeare’s troupe made shortly after…

Sometimes, the most useful scientific tool is a unique perspective. Leonid Kruglyak is a remarkable example of that fact. He originally trained as a physicist, and his quantitative background was foundational to his successful career in genetics and genomics. Kruglyak’s work focuses on the transmission of complex traits and the genetic basis of phenotypic variation. He…

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Michael Wangler Assistant Professor (starting July 2016) Department of Molecular and Human Genetics Baylor College of Medicine Lab website Research program: The overall long-term goal…

My apologies for this blog post to Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, who collaborated with Sir Arthur Sullivan on a series of comic operas that included The Pirates of Penzance. Pirates premiered in 1879 and featured a song called “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” and I am far from the first to…

“This is the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer. Because it’s very difficult to eliminate multiple genes from a cell . . . we decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route—even though nobody had been there before—to see if we could synthesize the…