This Week in Evolution – Details, episodes & analysis

Nels and Vincent discuss the genome sequence of an ancient wooly mammoth, which shows that the three-dimensional architecture of the DNA can persist after 50,000 years.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Three dimensional architecture of 50,000 year old wooly mammoth genome (Cell)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Nels – Mysterious SARS-CoV-2 variants showing up in sewer samples
Vincent – ‘Cocaine sharks’ found in waters off Brazil

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Nels and Vincent explore a direct experimental test of Ohno’s Hypothesis, which states that gene duplication can help genes tolerate new mutations and thus facilitates the evolution of new phenotypes.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Direct test of Ohno’s Hypothesis (eLive)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Nels – Experimental Evolution and the Nature of Biodiversity
Vincent – Is science’s dominant funding model broken?

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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)
•Letters read on TWiEVO 94

Nels – What happened at NIH during the last government shutdown
Vincent – Geneticist 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)

Nels – Life magnified stamp collection

Vincent – Matters 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)

Nels – How amino acids got their names (Source)

Vincent – EVs 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 RacanielloS

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•Heimdallarchaeial ancestry of eukaryotes (Nature)

Nels – Juneteenth issue of Cell – collection of essays from black and brown scientists

Vincent – Tara 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)

Nels – Zoonomia
Vincent – SeaPhages

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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)

Nels – TWiV 1000
Vincent – The 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)
•What the dogs of Chernobyl can teach us (Stat)
•Letters read on TWiEVO 88

Nels – Hellbent documentary and Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death
Vincent – BioRender

Walter – Oded 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)
•Letters read on TWiEVO 87

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

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