Over the last three years my lab has been using the zebrafish as a model for studying the effects of a diverse group of lens proteins called crystallins on lens development. You can read more about the evolution of these lens proteins in a previous post. We just added a new tool to the lab [...]
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My lab topped off a great academic year with a trip to Fort Lauderdale, Florida for the ARVO vision research meeting. This was actually my first time bringing undergraduate students to this meeting. Jackie Skiba and Amy Drossman did a fantastic job presenting their research on thermal adaptation in fish lens alpha crystallins. I heard [...] Understanding how blood cells are formed is not only important for developing treatments against numerous diseases, but also teaches us more about the fascinating process of turning stem cells into their specialized descendants. Recent work suggests that the initial stem cell that produces all of our blood’s formed elements (cells) comes in two flavors. But [...] I love showing students new research that will ultimately lead to a revision in their textbooks. Hey, something has got to make purchasing a new edition every two to three years seem worthwhile. And it is even more fun when these research headlines come out as we are covering that very topic in class. A [...] One of the most interesting sections of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species may be his struggles with perceived perfection in nature. In Chapter 6 Darwin confronts the organ of which William Paley would be most proud – the remarkable eye, and wonders how such a structure could have possibly evolved through his [...] When teaching marine biology I warn my students that if they are there to just learn about sharks and dolphins they will be sorely disappointed, because only microscopic plankton have the biomass to really affect the oceans. Being an ichthyologist this always hurt a bit. A recent paper in Science has restored my faith that all [...] Changing climates have the potential to wreck havoc on living things, which are often adapted to very specific local temperatures. These changes can alter the structure and, therefore, the function of the tens of thousands of proteins that keep cells and their owners alive. Yet, the presence of living things in extreme environments [...] Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science beat me to the punch on this one. You should check out his summary of a new paper by a group of excellent fish eye people on the spookfish, Dolichopteryx longipes. Like many mesopelagic fishes that live in these low light conditions, the spookfish has tubular [...] We form our conscious sense of vision using the occipital lobe of our cerebrum, the uppermost portion of the brain that has increased in size during mammalian (and independently in bird) evolution. Other vertebrates rely more heavily on other regions of the brain, especially the midbrain, to process sight. We still use a [...] An iTunes for science PDFs would be fantastic. Luckily it already exists. After trying to organize folder after folder of accumulated journal article PDFs I came across a piece of Mac software about a year ago that manages them for you. It also has powerful search abilities, will download PDFs and import meta data and [...] |
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