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Lurking in colonies of pathogenic bacteria are drug-resistant mutants. If the colony is exposed to antibiotics, these resistant mutants may survive, but they still face the challenge of recolonizing the host. Their success in this task depends on their diversity; a diverse population is more likely to harbor mutants that can withstand a second threat,…

Last week at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins provided an overview of model organism support from his agency. Collins used a new analysis performed by NIH staff to address concerns expressed by many of the model organism researchers gathered at TAGC, particularly a 2015 analysis by Michael…

For the past several decades, Shetland ponies’ collective past had caught up with them. A portion of the population of these miniature horses is affected by atavism, a phenomenon in which ancient characteristics are accidentally revived by mutations. Traits reincarnated in this way sometimes interact disastrously with the genetic background of the modern organism. For…

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…

Although some proteins have a single career, many—like Dis3—lead a double life. In the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, loss-of-function mutations in dis3 cause defects in mitosis, implying that Dis3 normally supports cell cycle progression. But perplexingly, results in humans suggest that Dis3 normally slows cell cycle progression: mutations that partially disable dis3 contribute to the development…

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…

Model Organism Databases (MODs) and the Gene Ontology Consortium play a crucial “behind-the-scenes” role in the work of model organism geneticists and many other biomedical researchers. This guest post by the newly-formed Alliance of Genome Resources announces the group’s intention to integrate the efforts of the MODs and other genome resources. You can learn more…

Phil Hieter, former GSA President and a Co-Chair for The Allied Genetics Conference, works at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, where Dave Ng directs the Michael Smith Laboratories Teaching Facility, AMBL. Dave developed a popular card game, Phylo, as a method to teach people about biodiversity, and Phil had an idea—what…

When it comes to genotyping technology, poop genetics is stuck in the 1990s. While most geneticists are now awash in genome-scale data from thousands of individuals, those who depend on  fecal and other non-invasively collected samples still rely on old-school, boutique panels of a dozen or so genetic markers. But feces — along with fur,…

In my thirty plus years as a faculty member I’ve had a lot of people in tears sitting in my office. Too many to tally, really. They were women and men, grad students and postdocs, from the U.S. and abroad, from my lab and other labs. How do we – charged with responsibility for the…