Nels and Vincent discuss the origins of two modern day agriculturally important plants: a role for two different wild teosintes in making modern maize, and the origin and evolution of the triploid cultivated banana genome.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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Science Picks 1:16:16

NelsWhy we need an academic career path that combines science and art – Nature Careers Podcast
Vincent – Science’s 2023 Breakthrough and Breakdown

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Nels and Vincent discuss how the rewetting of seasonally dried soils, a critical event in Mediterranean grasslands that reactivates dormant soil microorganisms, leading to pulses of carbon and nitrogen mineralization, and is accompanied by a bloom of viral diversity, followed by extensive viral community turnover.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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Download TWiEVO 95  (43 MB .mp3, 62 min)
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•Viral but not bacterial community turnover after rewetting dry soils (Nat Ecol Evol) 6:19

Science Picks 49:30

Nels – Bluesky
Vincent – Cancer Virus Hunters: A History of Tumor Virology

Listener Pick

RyanBirds in North American will be renamed

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Nels and Vincent take apart an amazing symbiosis consisting of two bacteria, one bacteriophage, and seven different genomes all within a single-celled alga.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•A single crowded cryptomonad cell (Curr Biol) 9:01
Letters read on TWiEVO 94 7:40

Science Picks 1:23:00

NelsWhat happened at NIH during the last government shutdown
VincentGeneticist J. Craig Venter: ‘I consider retirement tantamount to death’

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Nels and Vincent review a collision of synthetic biology and experimental evolution, using a minimal synthetic bacterial cell with only 473 genes, the smallest genome of any known organism that can be grown in lab culture.

 

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Evolution of a minimal cell (Nature) 6:10, 20:51

Science Picks 1:24:18

NelsLife magnified stamp collection

VincentMatters Microbial

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Nels and Vincent explain a study of how interspecies competition between two algae influences evolution of metabolism and size.

 

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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Metabolic evolution during competition (Curr Biol) 7:56

Science Picks 1:26:59

NelsHow amino acids got their names (Source)

VincentEVs Fix One Pollution Problem—And Worsen Another

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Nels and Vincent discuss new findings using phylogenetic approaches about how complex eukaryotic cells emerged from prokaryotic ancestors, which firmly place eukaryotes as a clade nested within the Asgard archaea.

 

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Heimdallarchaeial ancestry of eukaryotes (Nature) 7:43

Science Picks 1:23:25

NelsJuneteenth issue of Cell – collection of essays from black and brown scientists

VincentTara Oceans

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Nels and Vincent provide insights into the mystery of mouse mummies on the summits of >6000 m Andean volcanoes, including whether they were living there and if so why?

 

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Mystery of mouse mummies (bioRxiv) 10:16

Science Picks 1:19:04

NelsZoonomia
VincentSeaPhages

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Nels and Vincent discuss the observation that cells on a boundary of a solid tumor have higher growth rates compared to those in the center and how to model this difference using genome sequencing data.

 

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Evolutionary models of solid tumor growth (Nat Ecol Evol) 10:36

Science Picks 1:31:16

NelsTWiV 1000
VincentThe dream of wiping out polio might need a rethink

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Nels and Vincent review a study of the dogs of Chernobyl which reveals that genetically distinct populations with different amounts of western breed contributions to their genomes, the first step in assessing the effects of exposure to long-term ionizing radiation.

 

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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The dogs of Chernobyl (Science Adv) 8:20
•What the dogs of Chernobyl can teach us (Stat) 8:42
Letters read on TWiEVO 88 57:20

Science Picks 1:06:39

NelsHellbent documentary and Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death
VincentBioRender

Listener Pick

WalterOded Rechavi and interview

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Nathan joins Nels and Vincent to discuss his approach to understanding how species adopt novel traits to overcome challenges, and its application to identifying coding and noncoding sequence changes that underlie mammalian hairlessness.

 

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Nathan Clark

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•Gene loss in marine mammals (TWiEVO 34
•Gene change underlying mammalian hair loss (eLife) 32:57
Letters read on TWiEVO 87 1:25:01

Science Picks 1:15:57

NelsLocal news coverage of Amanda, Maria, and Nathan’s paper
VincentDiscovering Retroviruses by Anna Marie Skalka
Nathan – Genomics of Secondarily Temperate Adaptation in the Only Non-Antarctic Icefish

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