Tag: Misc.

M2O – Life on Mars

Scientists from NASA have reported what appears evidence that not has Mars has water in the past, but that it has flowed on the Martian surface in the last seven years. When comparing photographs of the same site in 1999 and 2005 taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, the scientists found

appearance of a lightly-shaded patch that has all the hallmarks of being caused by water bubbling up from under the Martian surface and running down the 30 degree slope

While there may be other explanations, the pictures are stunning. If this is water, I think we have to start to come to grips with the high probability that life will be found on Mars. In other words, not only might life have existed there in the past, but I think it is reasonably likely that there is life there now. Now before you get all hoity toity on me – I am not talking about little green men here. But possibly little green microbes. Or little pale microbes that use chemical energy to fix carbon and grow. Such microbes are of course all over earth, in the deep sea, in hot springs, in tidal flats, in animal guts. The real questions (again, if this is really water) the become:

  1. could life have evolved separately on Mars?
  2. could microbial life from Earth have seeded Mars?

I think the answers to both questions, though unclear, could potentially be yes. For question 1, if we look at the origin of life on Earth, most studies now suggest it happened over a relatively short time scale (a few hundred million years) and possibly much faster. It may in fact have been somewhat inevitable – as long as the conditions for chemical evolution were present in the Early earth. This chemical evolution could have then set up the possibility for life to have evolved. Though the exact steps are unclear for the origin of life on Earth, it is not far fetched to imagine that they could have occured on Mars as well.

As for question 2 – I think life easily could have been transported between the two planets. All you really need is for a meteorite or comet collision with Earth to blast some moderately sized pieces of material off of Earth into space. Microbes in such material could have survived for some period of time on such pieces in space (remember, many microbes do not need oxygen, and can survive incredibyl harsh conditions on Earth). Imagine if a big piece of Earth was knocked off the planet – microbes in the center of such a piece would be protected from some of the radiation and other stresses of space. And you just need one of these pieces to end up on Mars for the cross-seeding event to occur. Of sure, there are a series of assumptions here and a multiplication of low probability events. But we can make up for low probability by multiplying by 3.5 or so billion years – the amount of time that life has existed on Earth.

So this raises one final issue for me. The person with the greatest job title in the world – John Rummel, better get moving. He is the “Planetary Protection Officer” for NASA – charged with protecting other planets from Earth and Earth from other planets. One of his main jobs is to think about how to make sure the Martian missions do not bring microbes with them to Mars so that if microbes are found there we can assume they are from Mars not earth. Unfortunately in my google searches about this it seems Dr. Rummel has been promoted within NASA and I cannot figure out who took over his old job. Does that alas mean we are temporarily without a planetary protection officer? I hope not.

Whether it turns out life exists or existed on Mars or not, the finding of apparently flowing water on the surface is wildly exciting and proof to me that Mars missions are critical to our understanding of the world around us.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Difficult times in predicting flu evolution suggested by recent paper


There is a potentially controversial and very interesting article in the journal PLoS Pathogens on Flu Evolution. The study was led by Edward Holmes at Penn State, and co-authored by many researchers including colleagues of mine at my former institution TIGR. They performed a detailed evolutionary analysis of the cmplete genomes of 413 influenza A viruses of the H3N2 type (the H#N# system refers to the subtypes of Hemaglutanin and Neuraminidase genes).

The virus genomes were sequenced at TIGR using a high throughput flu viral genome sequencing protocol originally developed at described by Elodie Ghedin and colleagues here and here. The viruses they selected were from across New York State as part of a surveillance program.

Using a variety of evolutionary analyses including phylogenetic reconstructions and examination of substitution patterns, they come to a surprising conclusion – that

stochastic processes are more important in influenza virus evolution than previously thought, generating substantial genetic diversity in the short term

This may seem somewhat uninteresting to many out there but if true it is critically important in fighting flu and in understanding viral pathogen evolution. Right now there are substantial efforts to try and predict what future dominant flu strains will look like. These predictions tend to rely on assumptions that positive selection of viruses is critical in generating and maintaining diversity. If stochastic processes are as important as Holmes et al conclude, it would mean that more intensive monitoring of flu is needed in almost real time (since predicting random events tends to be, well, very hard).

I confess I have not tried to evaluate whether or not I think their conclusions are correct, but on first glance they seem sound. This just goes to show that general genomic surveys that try to be relatively unbiased in their sampling can reveal substantial novel patterns not seen before in highly target genome sequencing projects.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Has your scientific research been wasted?

I had a good Thanksgiving weekend this year – spending time with family and friends. But as I go back to work this week I have now gotten somewhat depressed over something I did Sunday night. I decided to remove myself from the UC Davis internet proxy to see how many of my past papers that I have published I can obtain without the UC subscriptions. So I went to pubmed, and typed in my name (Eisen JA) and got most of my papers, which are listed at the bottom of this blog (some do not come up due to publication off the pubmed grid or due to co-authors screwing up my initials). (NOTE  – LISTING DELETED 4/09 BECAUSE THE FORMATTING IS ALL MESSED UP)

And then I went to see how many of my papers were freely available and how many were not. What I was most interested in was – what is the deal with papers I wrote before becoming an Open Access convert? For many it is easy to figure out if they are freely available – Pubmed has a link saying “Free in PMC” which refers to Pubmed Central. For others, it was a little trickier.

The results were both good and bad and a summary is below. A few things struck me. First, a lot of my life’s work is not readily available without paying other for it. In the day and age of the internet, this means that these papers will simply be read less and less as time goes by. And that makes me very sad. If I had chosen to publish those papers in other journals, anyone in the world could get them at any time. Thankfully I did publish many papers in journals like PNAS, and ASM journals, and NAR – journals that have now decided to release them to Pubmed Central. And also thankfully (but less so) I published some papers in journals that have at least made them freely available on their web sites.

Most surprisingly to me is that a reasonable number of my papers in Nature are freely available on the Nature web site as part of their Genomics Gateway program. Nature deserves serious kudos for doing this and they stand out compared to Elsevier journals (which do not seem to ever do this) and even Science. This is disappointing as Science is published by a scientific society but apparently does not seem to care much about access to publications. Nature, a commercial publisher, is in my opinion doing more for scientific openness than Science. Now, Nature has a long way to go, but I am SO glad I listened to their editors like Chris Gunter and Tanguy Chouard who made a big deal about the Genome papers being free. I did not think it was that big a deal, but in retrospect they were ahead of me in thinking about availability. Plus Nature clearly makes more of an effort to provide free online material than they have to – and certainly make more available than Science.

So in the end – I am sad about my partially wasted past. But I am pleasantly surprised that at least some papers I thought would be more restricted are actually free (although only on the Publishers site for now – Hopefully these journals will submit them to PMC at some point). I guess – you win some and you lose some and some are somewhere in between.

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Summary of openness — other scientists should do this exercise

In Pubmed Central and Open Access

Available free on publisher’s sites (notideal but better than nothing)

Must buy paper

Not available anywhere

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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What is that NEXTgencode Advertising on My Site

So I saw this add on my site for NextGenCode. It was very cryptic so I went to their site.

They make their site seem like they are a Biotech company promoting genetic engineering as a tool in life enhancement. But looking at their articles and other material it became clear this was a spoof of some sort. The best part of their web site are the ads, like the one for Anhedonia and the one for Losing Blondes (about blondes going extinct in 200 years). I was guessing that this was some spoof put out by people to make fun of the synthetic biology field, but then I gave in a decided to google the company.

This is when I found the Wall Street Journal article that says they are a marketing ploy for a Michael Crighton novel. (I had not clicked on the link about a book stealing trade secrets form the company, but if you do, you get a story about Crighton’s novel stealing their ideas). While some may find the slight of hand they are using here to be deceptive or malicious, I think it is pretty funny. It did not take long for me to figure out it was a spoof of some sort and it was kind of fun trying to figure it out.

Good to see that my site is being used for important advertising. Some day I will discuss the ads on my site for Intelligent Design proponents.

Here are some additional stories about Nextgencode

Of course, any blog about Crighton would be incomplete without mentioning his scientific “credibility” or the debate about it. He has clearly written some interesting science-related books over the years and in many of them the science is not completely absurd. But his anti-global warming book, State of Fear, made Crighton seem like an anti-science advocate. Personally, I never read the book so I cannot comment about the issue directly. But here are some stories about the book for people to look at.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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A call for Open Access supporters to favor grant proposals from researchers promising Open Access publishing

In the world of scientific research, perhaps the most critical step is the acquisition of funding to do research. A key component of grant reviews these days are “Release Policies” for data, tools and research materials. In general, the more “Open” one is with these release policies, the more likely one is to get a grant. This of course makes great sense. If one is going to keep ones data or tools or material private for as long as possible, then one is not advancing science as rapidly as someone else who did the same work but also released everything rapidly.

I believe now is the time for the same thing to be done regarding Open Acces publishing. One can use the same litmus test here. Imagine two grant proposals, to do identical work. And furthermore, asssume the researchers will succeed in their work. And one researcher promised to publish in an Open Access manner while the other promises to publish in a non Open manner. Again, assuming everything else is equal, I think the proposal promising Open Access publishing HAS to be scored higher than the one promising non Open publishing.

Certainly in NSF proposals this could be considered as a component of the Broader Impact criteria and people should write it into their grants. If anyone has any ideas about how this could be specifically incorporated into NIH or DOE or other grants please let me know.

So I call on researchers who support Open Access publishing in any way to start to bring this up on grant panels and in grant reviews. And to score proposals accordingly. That is, if someone has a record of publishing in Open Access journals, they should be moved up a notch compared to others. Just how much is a “notch”. That should be up to individuals. But it is the principle here that is important – publishing in Open Access journals should be a component of grant reviews.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Neanderthals and Humans

So – we now have data and papers relating to some genome sequencing of DNA apparently from a Neanderthal fossil. I must say, even though I am a skeptic of much of the work on ancient DNA, I find the idea of sequencing the genome of a Neanderthal to be pretty cool. Perhaps more importantly than the scientific uses of this information, the sequencing is a brilliant public relations coup for genome sequencing. It is also a potentially useful tool in science and evolution education.

I will spare everyone my worries the scientific value of this work for now and am just using this post to collect links that I have found to be useful regarding Neandethal ancient DNA.

I will add more links in the next few days – or people can add them with comments

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Evolution Pumpkins

Evolution fans have to check out the pumpkins at this site. I found the site by browsing around the “ClutterMuseum” blog (I was checking it out because the author poster to my blog about Davis, CA). Now, I know the FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster) can be considered an in your face response to the intelligent design movement. But personally, the ID movement needs to be made fun of even more and the FSM is one of the best ways to do that. For more information you can read the “About” part of this blog.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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UC Davis Research Blog

Well, U. C. Davis (where I work) shows that it is both hip and dedicated to Science research with a new “Research Blog” put out by its University Communications office. It is called Egghead and its goal is:

Egghead is a blog about research by, with or related to UC Davis. Comments on posts are welcome, as are tips and suggestions for posts. General feedback may be sent to Andy Fell. This blog is created and maintained by UC Davis University Communications, and mostly edited by Andy Fell.

I am not sure how many other Universities have an officially sanctioned blog from the press office, but I could not find any.

My favorite post at Egghead so far is the one about a website called Adopt a Microbe. There is
absolutely no Davis connection to this site yet the wrote a tiny blurb about it anyway. I hope they continue to do things like this – it can get tedious if the blog is all about promoting Davis research only. It will certainly get read more if there is a diversity of stuff there.

It is good to see that Biology is the top subject there … not that there is anything wrong with other fields but one of the reasons I wanted to move to U. C. Davis was because of the amazing diversity of biology-related research going on on campus.

Now if they could only get a weekly podcast going …

If anyone out there knows of other Universities with interesting Blogs from the press office, let me know.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Hidden Gem in Davis – Farmer’s Kitchen Cafe

The Farmer’s Kitchen Cafe, which is part of the Natural FoodWorks Store, is possibly the biggest hidden gem of a restaurant in Davis. They specialize in :

delicious, homemade bioregional foods, free of gluten and casein. Your food is made with locally grown and organic fruits and vegetables, free range meats and wild fish. No aluminum pans, no hydrogenated fats, no microwaved foods, no unnatural additives.

Although the service there can be a little slow, that is part of the point. This is not a fast food restaurant. It is fresh, in season, homemade, and usually organic or at least local. Last time I went I had the chicken noodle soup, which was, I have to say, even better than mom used to make. It has a nice simple clear broth, a smattering of flavorful veggies and chicken, and a good helping of clearly top of the line noodles. I also had an organic eggplant sandwich with pesto and feta cheese that was nearly perfect. The eggplant was creamy and intermixed with the pesto into a spread with no hint of the bad eggplant flavors one can get sometime. Plus, there is a great basket of miscellaneous crayons and toys that our daughter spent much of the time playing with.

This is one of my favorite places in Davis and definitely worth a visit, especially if you are into sustainable, organic or local foods. Check it out at 624 4th Street or at their website.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Sea Urchin Genome and the Ridiculous Evolutionary Claims of Genome Researchers

All I can say is “AAAAARGH”

A sea urchin genome has been sequenced and there are some really interesting findings that have been reported based on analysis of the genome. For example, there appears to have been a large expansion of genes involved in the innate immune system in the species sequenced, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus.

All the good science aside, what most struck me were some of the ridiculous quotes attributed to some of the researchers in this project in stories and press releases. For example, in an article on MSNBC, George Weinstock says

“The sea urchin is surprisingly similar to humans,”
“Sea urchins don’t look any more like humans than fruit flies, but about 70 percent of sea urchin genes have a human counterpart whereas only about 40 percent of fruit fly genes do.”

Apparently, George was glossing over the reason this organism was chosen for sequencing in the first place. If you go to the NHGRIs web site you can get the white paper written that led to the selection of this species for sequencing. Perhaps the most important reason is that evolutionarily the sea urchin is closer to humans than fruit flies are. Therefore, it should only be a surprise to someone who does not know the evolutionary position of this species.

Perhaps even more appalling is the discussion of the apparent large number of genes for light sensory systems in this species. Again, Weinstock is quoted:

“There is not a lot of light at the bottom of the ocean, so it is not clear what they might be ‘seeing,'” Weinstock said. “This is certainly an area that will be studied intensively as a result of the genome project.”

I can only view this as some sort of joke. First of all, blind cavefish still have the genes for light perception even though they do not see. This is because it takes time for such genes to disappear. Second, apparently George has never really thought about where this species of sea urchin is found. It is found in the intertidal zone — hardly the dark depths of the ocean. I could go on and on but I will just get more annoyed. In this case, Weinstock has proven that many Genome Scientists are almost completely clueless about the organisms they are working on. Which is a shame. Becuase sea urchins are fascinating creatures and the fact that they are more closely related to humans than are most other invertebrates is one of the main reasons they have been a focus on so much research up until now. Oh well …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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