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Author Archives: Danielle Whittaker
Evolution 101: Host-Parasite Interactions: Of Mice and Cheese and Men and Zombies
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
Zachary Blount shows us evolution in action in E. coli
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
Posted in BEACON in the News, Videos
Tagged E. coli, long term evolution experiment, video
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BEACON Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellows Program
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
Evolution 101: Epistasis
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
Posted in Evolution 101
Tagged epistasis, Evolution 101, fitness, fitness landscapes
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Watch a talk by BEACON's Titus Brown
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.
Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics
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
Evolution 101: Maternal Effects
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
Posted in Evolution 101
Tagged Evolution 101, fitness, inheritance, Maternal effects, video
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Evolution 101: Adaptive Dynamics Models and Game Theory
This week’s Evolution 101 blog post is by MSU undergrad Faisal Tameesh and MSU grad student Emily Weigel. Mathematics developed from game theory has been used to study phenotypic evolution, or evolution in the way something “appears” or “behaves.” Particular … Continue reading
Evolution 101: Kin Selection
This week’s Evolution 101 blog post is by MSU graduate student Sara Garnett. As soon as spadefoot toad tadpoles are born, the pressure’s on. Adults lay their eggs in temporary ponds, created from sudden rainstorms in the southwestern desert. Because … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution 101
Tagged Evolution 101, fitness, Hamilton's rule, kin selection, tadpoles
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Evolution 101: Neuroevolution
This week we introduce a new occasional blog series: Evolution 101. Enjoy! If you were to ask a random person what the best example of Artificial Intelligence is out there, what do you think it would be? Most likely, it … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution 101
Tagged artificial intelligence, Evolution 101, evolutionary algorithms, Neuroevolution, video
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