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Sex determination is a critical developmental decision with major ecological and evolutionary consequences, yet a large variety of sex determination mechanisms exist and we have a poor understanding of how they evolve. Theoretical and empirical work suggest that compensatory adaptations to mutations in genes involved in sex determination may play a role in t […]

One of the students in the Intro Bio course I am teaching at UC Davis is interested in papers on the origin of meiosis and/or the origin of diploidy.  Some papers I have pulled up so far include: A Phylogenomic Inventory of Meiotic Genes:: Evidence for Sex in Giardia and an Early Eukaryotic Origin of Meiosis Origins of the machinery of recombination and sex […]

sed book This is the world's best introduction to sed - the superman of UNIX stream editing. Originally I wrote this introduction for my second e-book, however later I decided to make it a part of the free e-book preview and republish it here as this article. Introduction to sed Mastering sed can be reduced to understanding and manipulating the four spa […]

  Lab Times is a magazine that reports on news for life scientists in Europe. Their current issue (Sept. 14, 2011) has an "analysis" called Past, present and future Everything you ever wanted to know about the non-coding stretches of DNA. The author is Frederick Gruber who appears to be a science writer drawing on information supplied by various re […]

A growing number of phylogenomic investigations from diverse eukaryotes are examining conflicts among gene trees as evidence of horizontal gene transfer. If multiple foreign genes from the same eukaryotic lineage are found in a given genome, it is increasingly interpreted as concerted gene transfers during a cryptic endosymbiosis in the organism's evolu […]