TWiEVO 11: Microbial accomplices in multicellularity

sphaeroeca colony

Colony of choanoflagellates

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Nicole King

Nicole joins Nels and Vincent to discuss the finding of her laboratory that multicellular development of choanoflagellates, the closest living relatives of animals, is regulated by bacterial lipids.

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This episode is sponsored by CuriosityStream, a subscription streaming service that offers over 1,400 documentaries and non­fiction series from the world’s best filmmakers. Get unlimited access starting at just $2.99 a month, and for our audience, the first two months are completely free if you sign up at curiositystream.com/microbe and use the promo code MICROBE.

This episode is also sponsored by Drobo, a family of safe, expandable, yet simple to use storage arrays. Drobos are designed to protect your important data forever. Visit www.drobo.com to learn more.

Science Picks

Nels – I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong (Fresh Air interview)
Vincent – Viral Infections of Leisure by David Schlossberg

Listener Pick

Justin – Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll

Music on TWiEVO is performed by Trampled by Turtles

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TWiEVO 10: Spicing up peppered moths with a selfish gene

Black and peppered mothsHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent review experiments showing that the replacement of a pale moth with a black one during the industrial revolution was caused by a transposable element.

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This episode is sponsored by CuriosityStream, a subscription streaming service that offers over 1,400 documentaries and non­fiction series from the world’s best filmmakers. Get unlimited access starting at just $2.99 a month, and for our audience, the first two months are completely free if you sign up at curiositystream.com/microbe and use the promo code MICROBE.

Science Picks

Nels – Is Pokémon Go good for science? (one, two, three)
Vincent – Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

Music on TWiEVO is performed by Trampled by Turtles

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TWiEVO 9: How to crash your gene drive

female mosquitoHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Jim Bull

Nels and Vincent speak with Jim Bull about the results of genetic models which suggest that the evolution of inbreeding in response to lethal gene drive might make population control difficult to achieve.

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Science Picks

Nels – Fertilization with parasitic sperm
Vincent – Undark

Music on TWiEVO is performed by Trampled by Turtles

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TWiEVO 8: Everyone’s a little bit Neanderthal

Nels and VincentHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels visits Vincent in the MicrobeTV studio in New York and talks about how key genes of the Homo sapiens innate immune response were acquired from Neanderthals.

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Science Picks

Nels – DNA Clues to our Inner Neanderthal
Vincent – Blockhead

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TWiEVO 7: Pigeon fashion week, feathery boots edition

Muffed fairy swallowHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Mike Shapiro

Mike joins Nels and Vincent to talk about his work on what controls whether pigeons have scaly or feathered feet, and reveals that the hindlimbs of domestic birds with feathery feet are more like wings at the molecular level.

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Science Picks

Mike – Pigeon exhibit, Natural History Museum of Utah; Pigeonetics (App store); Darwin’s Pigeons
Nels – National Parasite Collection
Vincent – The Story Collider

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TWiEVO 6: Butterflies are free to shuffle

Dennis-ray mimicry ringHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent continue with an emerging sub-theme of TWiEVO – organisms with wings – as they reveal how enhancer shuffling produces diverse butterfly wing patterns.

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Science Picks

Nels – Hill Country Science Mill
Vincent – The Butterfly Conservatory

Listener Pick

Stephen – Darwin Legacy

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TWiEVO 5: Looking at straw colored fruit bats through a straw

straw colored batHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guests: Kartik Chandran and Sara Sawyer

Sara and Kartik join Nels and Vincent to talk about how the filovirus receptor NPC1 regulates Ebolavirus susceptibility in bats.

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Science Picks

Nels – Sundance Film Festival and Meru
Vincent – Quanta podcast (iTunes)
Sara – Isolation of Marburg viruses from fruit bats

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straw colored bat 2

Straw colored bat

 

Studio TwiEVO

Maryska Kaczmarek (a first author on the ELife paper), Nick Meyerson (rock god and science god), and Sara Sawyer

 

Esther, Kartik, and Melinda

Esther Ndungo and Melinda Ng (co-first authors on eLife paper) and Kartik Chandran.

TWiEVO 4: Taking the mystery out of the mystery of mysteries

Nitin PhadnisHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Nitin Phadnis

Nitin joins Nels and Vincent to explain how he identified a gene that is responsible for male inviability in hybrids from a cross between two species of fruit flies.

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Science Picks

Nels – Watercolor of Darwin and crew
Vincent – SpaceX rocket landing (Verge and ArsTechnica)
Nitin – 120th anniversary of Roentgen’s first X-ray

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TWiEVO 3: Recombination is for the birds

Taeniopygia guttataHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent discuss the evolution of recombination in the genomes of birds and yeast.

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Science Picks

Nels – Tardigrade horizontal gene transfer (The Atlantic article)
Vincent – Einstein’s theory of relativity changed everything

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TWiEVO 2: Faster than a speeding virus

HIV infected cellHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent talk about how a cellular enzyme contributes to the very high mutation rate of human immunodeficiency virus type 1.

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Science Picks

Nels – Antelope Island State Park (Bison herders wanted)
Vincent – Processed meats cause cancer

Music on TWiEVO is performed by Trampled by Turtles

Send your evolution questions and comments to twievo@microbe.tv