Community Voices

Today’s guest post is contributed by Robin Bisson, Director of the Genetic Expert News Service (GENeS). For scientists, talking to the media can be exciting, intimidating, powerful, or frustrating, and often a combination of all the above. It’s gratifying to read about your research in newspapers and well-read websites, or to see your name in…

Today’s guest post is authored by Diana Chu and Ahna Skop and features artwork from the Worm Art Show, recently held at the GSA-sponsored 20th International C. elegans Meeting in Los Angeles. Diana Chu is an Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University and Ahna Skop is an Associate Professor of Genetics at the…

Today’s guest post is by Tiffany Timbers, a neurogenomicist at Simon Fraser University. Follow her on Twitter: @TiffanyTimbers. This post about the Genetics Society of America 20th International C. elegans Meeting first appeared on Tiffany’s blog and is republished here with her permission. I just recently returned home from the 20th International C. elegans Meeting at UCLA.…

Today’s guest post was contributed by Andreas Prokop, of the University of Manchester. Along with research on the cell biology of neurons during development and ageing, he is engaged in many science communication and outreach projects. Follow him on Twitter: @Poppi62 More than a century of intense research with the fruit fly Drosophila has arguably turned…

Male Drosophila fruit flies perform an elaborate ritual when they court a female. The male first turns towards the female, follows her, taps her, vibrates his wings to produce a species-specific song, licks her genitalia, curves his abdomen toward her and, if all goes well, the pair finally copulate. These complex routines may help flies…

With genomic data from hundreds of thousands of people accumulating, geneticists are now able to mine these data for very rare, but very informative genetic variants, including loss-of-function alleles. For example, across the enormous “reference set” of human exomes announced at the 2014 American Society for Human Genetics Meeting, on average there’s a variant every six bases. In the first of our reports from the ASHG…