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.
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.
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.
TWiEVO 7: Pigeon fashion week, feathery boots edition
- April 23, 2016
- Tagged as: chicken, Darwin, evolution, feathered feet, limb development, limb identity, pigeon, scaled feet
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.
Nels and Vincent continue with an emerging sub-theme of TWiEVO – organisms with wings – as they reveal enhancer shuffling as a mechanism for producing diverse butterfly wing patterns.
TWiEVO 3: Recombination is for the birds
- January 9, 2016
- Tagged as: breakpoint, DNA, evolution, finches, genome, hotspots, meiosis, Molly Przeworski, PRDM9, rearrangment, recombination, SPO11, yeast
Nels and Vincent discuss the evolution of recombination in the genomes of birds and yeast.
TWiEVO 2: Faster than a speeding virus
- December 26, 2015
- Tagged as: APOBEC, enzyme, evolution, HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, mutation, mutation rate, viral, virology, virus, viruses
Nels and Vincent talk about how a cellular enzyme contributes to the very high mutation rate of human immunodeficiency virus type 1.
TWiEVO 1: When (scientific) worlds collide
- December 12, 2015
- Tagged as: arms races, biology, Darwin, evo-devo, evolution, evolutionary, genome, genotype, phenotype, species
Nels and Vincent launch a new podcast on evolution, and start by discussing how the field has changed through recent mergers of evolutionary and experimental biology in the post-genome era.
