Monthly Archives: September 2012

Evolution 101: Host-Parasite Interactions: Of Mice and Cheese and Men and Zombies

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s Evolution 101 Post is by MSU graduate student Alita Burmeister. Hollywood loves a good parasite story—from zombies and vampires to Alien and Star Trek II — nothing creeps audiences out like a parasitic infection that controls its host’s … Continue reading →

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Zachary Blount shows us evolution in action in E. coli

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

BEACON member Zachary Blount, formerly a graduate student and now a postdoc in Richard Lenski’s lab, is the lead author on a new paper in Nature describing the step-by-step process by which E. coli evolved the ability to consume citrate … Continue reading →

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BEACON Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellows Program

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

BEACON is once again accepting applications for the Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellows Program. BEACON is an NSF Science and Technology Center headquartered at Michigan State University with partners at North Carolina A&T State University, University of Idaho, University of Texas at … Continue reading →

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Evolution 101: Epistasis

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s Evolution 101 post is by MSU postdoc Bjørn Østman. Bjørn also blogs at Pleiotropy. What is epistasis? Epistasis is a measure of the strength of epistatic interactions. Epistatic interactions are non-additive interactions between alleles, loci, or mutations. That is, … Continue reading →

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Watch a talk by BEACON's Titus Brown

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

C. Titus Brown, “Streaming lossy compression of biological sequence data using probabilistic data structures.” A talk given at the Michigan State University Computer Science department on September 7, 2012.

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Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s Evolution 101 blog post is by MSU graduate student Byron Smith. Evolution is often thought of as a constant, gradual change in the characteristics of a species based on how well those traits are adapted to a static … Continue reading →

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Evolution 101: Maternal Effects

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s Evolution 101 blog post is by MSU graduate student Emily Weigel. This is a moment to thank your mom. Mothers have more of an effect on their offspring than one might first think. In addition to the DNA, … Continue reading →

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