Punctuated equilibrium of my blog … and a look at an old science rap

Well, with my new role in PLoS Biology as Academic Editor in Chief, I had planned to start blogging more about PLoS and PLoS Biology. And I will. However, I am going to have to do a half effort on this for at least a week or two as I have a lovely ailment called trigger finger which is making typing rather awkward. So in lieu of a detailed blog I simply have to make a brief comment on one of the articles in this months issue

The article in which I am interested is a nice primer on mutational meltdown in mammalian mitochondrial genomes by Dave Rand. This is in relation to a paper by Stewart et al. in this issue. But enough about science. For those who do not know, Dave Rand published what I believe was the first rap in a scientific article. In an article in Genetics he presented a rap about repeat induced point mutation (something known as RIPPING). This RAP about RIPPING I think was presented at the Evolution meeting in Berkeley (I think I was at the talk where he did the RAP but I am not sure — I could have, like Andy Pettite, misremembered the whole thing).

And well, here it is:

Yo! you’ve got my DNA and you think it is a-RIPping,
Your dog is so excited her saliva is a-dripping,
She seems to think the polymerase is doing some a-skipping,
But then again, you never know, she might just be a-quipping.
Are you sure induction by repeats did make it happen?
If it’s just associated, why not call it RAPpin’?
What motifs are necessary to keep the strands a-snappin’?
I don’t know and I don’t care, but something did some zappin’.

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen