Misc. – Page 165 – Jonathan Eisen's Lab

Francisco J. Ayala – Evolution – Scientists Who Believe in God – – New York Times

Good to see someone other than Francis Collins getting some press about bridging the gap between evolution and religion. Today it is Francisco Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at UC Irvine. There is an interesting story about him in the New York Times today (Francisco J. Ayala – Evolution – Scientists Who Believe in God ).

Now, I thought I knew a good deal about Ayala but I did learn a bit in the article about his life and background (e.g., he was a Dominican priest, which I did not know). I personally think the “religion” vs. “evolution” debate is pretty silly much of the time and succumbs to the modern obsession with controversy. Ayala’s new book “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion” apparently addresses this issue and I hope it does a better job than Collins’ book, which I found to be wanting in many areas. Of course, I guess I am a bit biased since I have had a soft spot for Ayala for many years and since he just wrote a very positive review of my new Evolution textbook. Now, if Collins wrote a positive review, I do not think I would like his book any more, but who knows …

Reminder About the NIH Public Access Policy

To all interested in Open Access publishing

Here is an email I just got from NIH

April 28, 2008

Dear Members of the NIH Research Community:

I am writing to remind you that the mandatory NIH Public Access Policy (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html) applies to final peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008. Making published research funded by NIH accessible to everyone, including health care providers, patients, educators and scientists, helps advance science and improve human health. We all have a role to play in achieving this goal, and I appreciate your efforts to make the NIH Public Access Policy successful.

The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (see http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm), which was signed into law late last year. Compliance with this Policy is a legal requirement and a term and condition for all active grants and contracts awarded as of April 7, 2008. Failure to comply may trigger one or more enforcement actions, depending on the severity and duration of the non-compliance.

Please see the Public Access Web site for the tools you need to comply with the Policy. The Web site houses Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), training information, and other resources.

To ensure compliance with the Policy, please remember to:

Address Copyright – Make sure that any copyright transfer or other publication agreements allow your paper to be submitted to NIH in accordance with the Policy.

Submit Papers upon Acceptance for Publication

1. Some journals will submit the final published article on your behalf, without your involvement. See http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm for a list of these journals.

2. For any journal other than those on this list, please:

a. When submitting a paper for publication, inform the journal that the final peer-reviewed manuscript is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy.

b. Make sure that any copyright transfer or other publication agreement allows the final peer-reviewed manuscript to be submitted to NIH in accordance with the Policy. For more information, see the FAQ Whose approval do I need to submit my article to PubMed Central? and consult with your Institution.

c. Submit the final peer-reviewed manuscript to NIH upon acceptance for publication at http://www.nihms.nih.gov/. See the Submission Process for more information.

Cite Papers

§ When citing your NIH-funded papers in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports, please include the PubMed Central reference number (PMCID) for each paper.

§ NIH will monitor compliance through citations. Effective May 25, 2008, when your NIH Program Officer reviews your progress report or application, he or she will be expecting a PMCID in the citation of every applicable paper that arose out of your NIH funding, or a manuscript submission system reference number (NIHMSID) if the PMCID has not been issued. See Section C of our FAQ for examples.

§ If you publish through a journal listed under http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm, there might be a slight delay in assignment of a PMCID. That is okay. We have signed agreements with these journals that allow NIH to resolve submission with them without your involvement. To facilitate your Program Officer’s job, we ask that you indicate ‘PMC Journal- In Process’ until the PMCID is available.

The NIH Public Access Policy is a legal requirement and represents an important opportunity for science and medicine. We are very interested in your feedback on the Policy and are soliciting input through a request for information from March 31, 2008 to May 31, 2008. Please send any comments or suggestions to http://publicaccess.nih.gov/comments.htm.

Sincerely,

Norka Ruiz Bravo, PhD

NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research

A good Earth Day for me

Well, Earth Day 2008 is almost over. And I guess I had a really good one. I was scheduled to give a talk at 1 PM at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) as part of their Genomics Division Seminar Series. Living in Davis, LBNL is about 1 hour away if there is no traffic and much longer if there is traffic. And so I said, why not try to honor the Earth and not drive and instead take the train. In part I was inspired by the Michael Pollan’s article in this Sunday’s New York Times about the little things we can do to help the Earth. In part I was inspired by Earth Day. In part I was inspired by going to the Department of “Energy”. And in part I was just looking to get some exercise. But here is the story of my day …

Part one of this adventure was pretty easy. It is about a fifteen minute ride on my mountain bike from my house to the Amtrak stop in Davis. So I headed out about 25 minutes before the train was supposed to leave. And I got my ticket and then hopped on the train with my bike.

And then we sat for 30 minutes or so at the Davis station waiting for a track inspection. Did I get frustrated? Nope. I had my iPhone and my laptop. And I worked on my talk while listening to Science Friday podcasts. And eventually we moved out of the station. And then we got stuck again near Martinez for 15 or so minutes. I was now getting a little worried about timing, but after a phone call with my brother in Berkeley, who I was going to meet, I calmed down (realizing that the people I was hoping to meet at Berkeley could wait for another day) and arranged to meet him at the train stop.

And we met a few blocks from the Berkeley Amtrak stop and began the ride up to LBNL. Past downtown Berkeley. Past UC Berkeley Campus. And up the hill past the Botanic Gardens. Now for real bikers and for me in my past, this would be nothing. But for a flatlander who only sees hills riding across the overpasses over roads, this was a big deal. And finally, we got there. And I changed into a PLoS shirt my brother brought and jeans I had brought and had lunch my brother made ( a PB & J sandwich using jam I had given him that I made from our apricots from my tree that I had frozen last summer). And I chatted with some people coming for my talk, including one of my co-conspirators for the my April 1 joke, Chris Patil, who writes the Ouroboros Blog. Also there were Eddy Rubin (my host and Director of JGI), Janet Jannson (an expert in the human microbiome, among many things), Paul Spellman, Todd Desantis (one of the top rRNA analysis folks around) Mina Bissel. And then I gave my talk (I think it went pretty well … but I am not exactly objective).

Then after I talked to some people for 20 or so minutes. And then we rode down the hill. A lot quicker than up for sure. And I went to my brother’s new lab on UCB’s main campus for a party for one of his students who just passed his quals. After a little food and some discussions I headed out. And then I met my friend and co-author of my new Evolution textbook Nipam Patel for a 15 minute mini chat. And then I zipped down to the Amtrak station with 15 minutes to spare so I stopped at the Pasta Shop for a snack. And then I took the train back to Davis (it was on time) and looked out the window at the SF Bay and then the marshlands and then the farmlands. And finally, I rode back to my house by 5:30 PM to hang out with my family. What a nice day – no car. Some exercise. Some science. Some friends. Some fun. So – thanks for the inspiration, Earth, Michael Pollan and Michael Eisen.

Trip to CALIT2 & CAMERA

Just got back from a one day trip to San Diego to visit the folks who run CAMERA, the metagenomics database being run out of CALIT2/JCVI. The main point of this meeting was to start to figure out how to take computational tools that we have developed in my lab or will develop in my new iSEEM project (with Katie Pollard and Jessica Green) and make them available in CAMERA.

But as usual, the most fun part of the trip was to see the CALIT2 toys. And boy do they have toys. Larry S marr, the director of CALIT2 and the PI on the CAMERA project (funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation) gave us a quick tour around the building. My slide show is embedded below. Mostly we got to see the massive multimonitor “optiportal” display walls. We also got to see the big linux cluster that is the guts of CAMERA (and may favorite part, of course – the big PLoS Biology sign relating to the Global Ocean Survey papers in front of the computer).

CAMERA, which stands for Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (thus, why we say CAMERA), is a big and complex enterprise, hosting metagenomics sequence data, metadata associated with the sequence, and a variety of analysis tools for working with the data. You can find out more about it in a paper from PLoS Biology here.

Now, CAMERA is not the only metagenomics database out there. The other main one people seem to use is IMG/M from JGI. If you are interested in metagenomics analysis in any way, it is worth becoming familiar with both systems.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Picnic Day Pictures

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Pictures of Covell Bike Tunnel Being Constructed

IMG_0903.JPG

Open Access Week

I guess, in my effort to catch up on work after spending time working on an April fools joke, I missed that last week was the first “Open Access Week” at least, as promoted by some key OA bloggers (see here, here, here, and here). This was done in honor of the new NIH policy on Open Access to Publications that commenced last week.

Se McBlawg for more detail at: ‘Open Access Week’: Some Posts from the Blogosphere

Mutualisms Rule – So Says Olivia Judson at the Wild Side

Nice blog today on mutualisms by Olivia Judson who writes the Wild Side blog/column for the New York Times (I seem to be writing a lot about writers for the NY Times these days … not sure what is going on with that). She even features one of my favorite organisms in the blog:

The clam Calyptogena magnifica, which lives on deep-sea vents, depends on a bacterium to supply it with nutrients; the bacterium is transmitted through the clam’s eggs

Last year we published a paper on the complete genome sequence of this symbiont (which I wrote about here when I was clearly in a whiny kind of mood). And Judson picks up on a part of the story on the clam that is rarely discussed – the symbionts are transmitted vertically from parent to offspring. Vertical transmission seems to be linked to multiple properties of the symbionts (see my discussion of this regarding the glassy winged sharpshooter symbionts here).

Judson’s post is really worth checking out for the symbiosis fans out there. She does a good job of highlighting diversity and evolution of mutualisms in a relatively short post.

See my video of a dissection of a baby Calyptogena:

PLoS Biology – Darwinian Evolution on a Chip

For evolution afficionados, there is a cool new paper in PLoS Biology on using a microfluidic chip to conduct in vitro evolution experiments.

The paper, by Brian Paegel and Gerry Joyce from the Scripps Research Institute

relies on computer control and microfluidic chip technology to automate the directed evolution of functional molecules, subject to precisely defined parameters. We used a population of billions of RNA enzymes with RNA-joining activity, which were challenged to react in the presence of progressively lower concentrations of substrate. The enzymes that did react were amplified to produce progeny, which were challenged similarly. Whenever the population size reached a predetermined threshold, chip-based operations were executed to isolate a fraction of the population and mix it with fresh reagents. These steps were repeated automatically for 500 iterations of 10-fold exponential growth followed by 10-fold dilution.

They have a nice figure summarizing the system which I show below — and people should check out the article. Note – I can legally include this figure here because of the use of a broad Creative Commons License by PLoS Biology. Note – one of the stories I saw about this at Medgadget.Com also pointed out how they can use the article however they want because of where it was published. The power of true Open Access.

(A) The evolution chip is mounted on a temperature-controlled stage. Solutions containing polymerase enzymes (E) and mono- and oligonucleotide components (S) are delivered to the chip via capillary tubing and output to a pressure-controlled collection vial (O). A microscope objective is used to focus laser excitation (λ_ex = 490 nm) on the microfluidic channel and to gather fluorescence (λ_em = 535 nm), which is detected with a confocal PMT. Valve actuation and fluid flow are controlled by six independent vacuum lines.

(B) The microfluidic device is shown with the active circuit filled with blue dye.

(C) The serial dilution circuit consists of a mixing loop with fluid flow channels (red), fluid access reservoirs (blue), and control valves (black). Fluid flow around the loop is controlled by three two-way valves (a, b, and c). Fluid access to the loop from the input reservoirs (R_E and R_S) and to the output reservoir (R_O) is controlled by bus valves (in and out). The bus valves allow access when open, and prevent access while preserving fluidic continuity within the loop when closed.

(D) During operation of the circuit, the expanding RNA population is incubated while undergoing slow cyclic mixing until the fluorescence reaches a pre-determined threshold. Then an aliquot of the population is isolated between valves in and out as fresh solutions of E and Sin and out, and the aliquot is mixed with the fresh solutions by rapid serial actuation of valves a, b, and c. Open valves are indicated by filled circles; closed valves are indicated by a red X. are drawn into the loop and spent materials are delivered to the collection vial. Finally, the loop is sealed by closing valves

From: Darwinian Evolution on a Chip Paegel BM, Joyce GF PLoS Biology Vol. 6, No. 4, e85 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060085

NIH Mandate on Open Access – Good First Step, Thanks to PLoS et al, but still a long way to go

Well, today is the day. The day after the new NIH mandate on Open Access (also see here for more information) to publications has begun. I think this is a great great day for science. And for society and Congress should be commended for doing something that is good for the country and the world that may have upset some of their big donors (i.e., the publishing industry).

And I think we all owe a big round of thanks to those who worked towards this goal. Clearly, there were many involved in convincing Congress to do this, from concerned members of the public, to SPARC and other NGOs, to tireless individuals like Peter Suber, and of course the Public Library of Science. For those who do not know, or may have forgotten, the Public Library of Science got it’s beginnings as an initiative to promote Open Access publishing (and it was not initially a publisher of journals). PLoS was founded by Harold Varmus, Pat Brown and Michael Eisen (my brother) in 2000. The first thing they did was circulate a petition to promote open access publishing. I signed the letter as did many many others. But alas, it was not enough. And so PLoS started its journals and many realized that it would be necessary for funding agencies to step in and require Open Access publishing for work they funded. And after a long struggle, we are now here with the new NIH mandate (as well as mandates from other agencies which got there before NIH). And I think that we all owe a big thanks to everyone behind this initiative. Also it is worth checking out Harold Varmus’ essay today on the new NIH initiative in PLoS Biology.

I note, however, that the NIH policy is only a first step. It does not move us completely towards true Open Access to scientific publications. There are still issues that need to be addressed, including the timing of release of publications (I think everything should be released immediately, not after a 6 or 12 month delay), the issue of Copyright, the need to get old publications into the public domain, and how putting material in Pubmed Central does not completely open it up to the world (see Peter Murray-Rust’s very interesting discussion of this on his blog). So there is still much work to be done. But nevertheless, I am happy to be living in this new world where NIH has made OA a key part of it’s mandate.

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