Science & Publishing

Coral reefs around the world are “bleaching”, a threat caused by breakdown of the symbiosis between the coral animals (cnidaria) and the dinoflagellate algae that live within their cells. Yet this crucial symbiotic partnership is poorly understood. To address this knowledge gap, biologists are developing a suite of genomic tools for the sea anemone Aiptasia. This…

Do aging males make poorer quality sperm? Older mothers face a well-established risk of producing eggs with chromosome abnormalities, but it is less clear how age affects meiosis in males. In the February issue of GENETICS, Vrooman et al. investigated chromosome dynamics during spermatogenesis in mice of different ages. They found that meiotic errors increased…

Transposable elements don’t proliferate in genomes at a steady pace; they often arrive in bursts. But models of neutral TE evolution assume transposition occurs at a constant rate. That makes it harder to test, for instance, whether low TE allele frequencies in a population are due to negative selection or just a recent transposition burst.…

The loblolly pine genome is big. Bloated with retrotransposons and other repetitive sequences, it is seven times larger than the human genome and easily big enough to overwhelm standard genome assembly methods. This forced the loblolly pine genome sequencing team, led by David Neale at the University of California, Davis, to look for ways to…