Prochlorococcus on Science Friday

Well, I wish I had known this in advance and I would have posted something about it here before last Friday. But anyway – Penny Chisholm (from MIT) and her beloved Prochlorococcus (important photosynthetic marine microbes) were featured on Science Friday last week. Fortunately, NPR broadcast’s like ScienceFriday are a form of Open Access. And you can listen to Penny here. It makes for some good listening — she has some good lines about the importance of microbes as well as the need for more support for work on microbes. She also gives a good plug for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Marine Microbiology Initiative (full disclosure – I just got a grant from this program). Note – the Science Friday host makes a bit of a blunder when at the end he asks if they have talked about viruses when a few minutes before she had done exactly that (for more on Prochlorococcus viruses see the Sullivan et al PLoS Biology paper here). You can also get a video of Penny giving a talk here.

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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

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