Nels and Vincent review a collision of synthetic biology and experimental evolution, using a minimal synthetic bacterial cell with only 473 genes, the smallest genome of any known organism that can be grown in lab culture.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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• Evolution of a minimal cell (Nature)
Nels – Life magnified stamp collection
Vincent – Matters Microbial
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Nels and Vincent explain a study of how interspecies competition between two algae influences evolution of metabolism and size.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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• Metabolic evolution during competition (Curr Biol)
Nels – How amino acids got their names (Source)
Vincent – EVs Fix One Pollution Problem—And Worsen Another
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Nels and Vincent discuss new findings using phylogenetic approaches about how complex eukaryotic cells emerged from prokaryotic ancestors, which firmly place eukaryotes as a clade nested within the Asgard archaea.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent RacanielloS
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•Heimdallarchaeial ancestry of eukaryotes (Nature)
Nels – Juneteenth issue of Cell – collection of essays from black and brown scientists
Vincent – Tara Oceans
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Nels and Vincent provide insights into the mystery of mouse mummies on the summits of >6000 m Andean volcanoes, including whether they were living there and if so why?
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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•Mystery of mouse mummies (bioRxiv)
Nels – Zoonomia
Vincent – SeaPhages
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Nels and Vincent discuss the observation that cells on a boundary of a solid tumor have higher growth rates compared to those in the center and how to model this difference using genome sequencing data.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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•Evolutionary models of solid tumor growth (Nat Ecol Evol)
Nels – TWiV 1000
Vincent – The dream of wiping out polio might need a rethink
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Nels and Vincent review a study of the dogs of Chernobyl which reveals that genetically distinct populations with different amounts of western breed contributions to their genomes, the first step in assessing the effects of exposure to long-term ionizing radiation.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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•The dogs of Chernobyl (Science Adv)
•What the dogs of Chernobyl can teach us (Stat)
•Letters read on TWiEVO 88
Nels – Hellbent documentary and Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death
Vincent – BioRender
Walter – Oded Rechavi and interview
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Nathan joins Nels and Vincent to discuss his approach to understanding how species adopt novel traits to overcome challenges, and its application to identifying coding and noncoding sequence changes that underlie mammalian hairlessness.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
Guest: Nathan Clark
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•Gene loss in marine mammals (TWiEVO 34)
•Gene change underlying mammalian hair loss (eLife)
•Letters read on TWiEVO 87
Nels – Local news coverage of Amanda, Maria, and Nathan’s paper
Vincent – Discovering Retroviruses by Anna Marie Skalka
Nathan – Genomics of Secondarily Temperate Adaptation in the Only Non-Antarctic Icefish
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Nels and Vincent discuss how evolution of changes in stop codon assignment might occur, and a novel mechanism for altering the meaning of translation stop codons discovered in a trypanosomatid with the apropos name, Blastocrithidia nonstop.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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•Novel stop codon reassignment mechanisms (Nature)
Nels – Protein Synthesis: An epic on the cellular level
Vincent – Widespread stop-codon recoding in bacteriophages may regulate translation of lytic genes discussed on TWiM 277
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Nels and Vincent discuss the use of genome sequence data for over 4,000 domestic, semi-feral, and wild canids to understand the genetic drivers of canine behavior.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Ghosts of Science Past Still Haunt Us by C. Brandon Ogbunu
Vincent – The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll
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Nels and Vincent review the use of ancient DNA to identify loci that may have been under selection during the Black Death by studying populations before, during, and after the pandemic.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Interview with Paul Turner in Current Biology and Map of the World if you are a fish
Vincent – Smallpox and its eradication
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Florian Maderspacher from Current Biology joins Nels and Vincent to discuss a special issue of the journal on birds.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
Guest: Florian Maderspacher
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Florian – Favorite birds of authors/contributors in Birds issue
Nels –Loss of avian intromittent organs as a sperm competition strategy: a race to be last
Vincent – Malaria at the Bronx Zoo (TWiP 110)
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Nels and Vincent consider evidence that a single amino acid change in the TKTL1 gene might have led to greater neurogenesis in the frontal cortex of modern humans compared with Neanderthals.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Unusual display of elements
Vincent – Sykdomspulsen and summary
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Nels and Vincent discuss how duplication of a gene encoding a transcription factor led to evolution of a novel cell type in the slime mold Dictyostelium.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Dall-E artificial intelligence meets art
Vincent – John Bonner’s slime mold movies
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Louise Moncla joins Nels and Vincent to review her use of genomics to understand emergence, evolution, and transmission of respiratory viruses including influenza virus H5N1, mumps virus, and SARS-CoV-2.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
Guest: Louise Moncla
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Nels – JWST Images
Vincent – 3rd International Symposium on Infectious Diseases of Bats and Program
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Nels and Vincent discuss an analysis of the drivers of evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during chronic infections, indicating that a tradeoff exists between antibody evasion and fitness.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – NASA scientists say images from the Webb telescope nearly brought them to tears
Vincent – FDA: Don’t rush a move to change the Covid-19 vaccine composition
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Nels and Vincent provide an update on cases of monkeypox, and summarize a biochemical view of three changes in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that may balance positive and negative selection.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Science on the Side podcast by Morgan Nelson and Ty Chiaro
Vincent – Richard Ernst Lecture 2022
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Alex joins Nels and Vincent to discuss his work which demonstrates that somatic mutation rates scale with lifespan in mammals.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
Guest: Alex Cagan
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Alex – Paper.app
Nels – Fifty years since Lewontin’s apportionment of human diversity
Vincent – An Exceptional Village
Martha – Plagues Upon the Earth by Kyle Harper
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Nels and Vincent describe how a single amino acid change can allow E. coli to replace the essential gut symbiont of the stinkbug Plautia stali.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Inequality in science and the case for a new agenda
Vincent – Foundations of Virology by Fred Murphy
Sam – Saturday Morning Breakfast – Evolutionist
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Nels and Vincent review isolation of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses from bats in Laos that can replicate in human cells.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Erich Jarvis on scientists and public engagement
Vincent – Polio type 1 in Africa
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Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
Guest: Joe Graves
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Nels – Where is Webb?
Vincent – Black Microbiologists Association
Joe – Biology versus bias
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Nels and Vincent review three aspects of SARS-CoV-2: phylogenetics of Omicron, a two-step fitness selection for variants, and putative RNA insertions from host genomes.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Plant virus satellite accelerates wing formation in insect
Vincent – A plant virus that switched to vertebrates
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Nels and Vincent discuss evolutionary evidence for an epidemic of coronavirus infection over 20,000 years ago in East Asia, and reconstruction of the membrane differences between bacteria and Archaea reveals unexpected differences in permeability.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science
Vincent – Virology Live
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Nels and Vincent explain a method to calculate the mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2, and the role of a single amino acid change in spike in enhancing fitness of the delta variant and enabling it to out-compete the alpha variant.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – Leading Edge Symposium
Vincent – Epidemiological and evolutionary dynamics of SARS-CoV-2
Thomas – The gene’s-eye view of evolution by J. Arvid Ågren
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Carl Zimmer joins Nels to talk about science writing, science communication, viruses, and his new book, On Life’s Edge.
Host: Nels Elde
Guest: Carl Zimmer
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Nels – Remembrance of Dick Lewontin
Carl – From telomere to telomere: the transcriptional and epigenetic state of human repeat elements
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Nels and Vincent discuss the identification of novel bat coronaviruses that shed light on the evolution of SARS-CoV-2, dating the first cases of COVID-19 to mid-November 2019, and recovery of deleted genome sequences from early in the Wuhan outbreak.
Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello
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Nels – The Last—And Only—Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out
Vincent – Human Behavior During the Pandemic Is More Important Than Any Covid Variant
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