Scott writes:

Hi Nels and Vincent,

Firstly, thank you for the excellent and fascinating podcast. I found you via Twiv, and I’ve been listening for a couple of years now. My favourite episode was Twievo 24 with Marco Vignuzzi. I think I listened to it at least four times to try to get an understanding of the quasispecies concept as it relates to RNA viruses.

I also enjoyed the most recent episode about antifreeze proteins in cod. I work in a lab that develops vaccines for farmed fish, and anything fish related always gets my attention.

On that note, I recently came across this fascinating research from Peter Unmack and coworkers on the persistence of so called ‘ghost’ genomes in a population of fish in Australia. These are parasitic haploid genomes of an effectively extinct species that persist in a living population of hybrids. It might even make a nice paper for discussion on the podcast.

Links to the original article and a nice blog post by one of the authors are copied below.

Arthur George’s Blog Post about the research

Original article in Nature Scientific Reports

Keep up the great work!

Scott

PS. Its a beautiful sunny autumn morning here in Tasmania with a temperature of 13.5 C, but the first frosts are probably not far away.

Ornob writes:

Hello Nels and Vincent,

This is Ornob from Bangladesh. I had written to you guys earlier asking for advice about PhD applications, and would like to first thank you for your informative and thoughtful answers. I have since applied and gotten into a few programs, and will be starting at NYU this fall. The program and professors at NYU offer a lot in terms of learning computational skills and population genetics, and I am super excited.

Second, I was really excited to come across this new paper on the evolution of the RAG recombinase, and thought it might be cool for a TwiEvo episode. You’ve probably already seen it, but the paper is called “Transposon molecular domestication and the evolution of the RAG recombinase”, and here is a link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1093-7

Thanks!