This live blog will be used during SMBE 2017 to keep track of what happens during the conference - through the eyes of one attendee.
Marco Fumasoni speaking about the evolution of the replisome. Speaking about experimental approaches – genetic perturbation.
CTF4 deletion – a deletion that doesn’t kill organisms, but makes them a bit sick – poor growth etc. Evolved three different different populations of genotypes (8 populations).
Measuring fitness relative to the original / wild type. then sequenced the genomes of the evolved populations.
Resulted in mutations in parallel in similar places – in other words, the same solutions were used in different populations in order to increase fitness.
IE introduces LUCApedia: http://eeb.princeton.edu/lucapedia/
Ingo Ebersberger now speaking about the traceability of proteins – how well we can identify homologs with increasing sequence divergence.Showing that protein function plays a huge role – metabolism most conserved in yeast, regulation less so and the fastest evolving set of genes are enriched in reproduction proteins.
MOC says that at some time-points in animal evolution there has been a burst of gene fusions – the origins of metazoa, the origins of bony fishes are two.
MOC speaking about how sequence similarity networks can be used to discover interesting patterns. Saying that the MCL algorithm eliminates real relationships and prevents us from seeing them.
Mary O’Connell speaking about domain shuffling and protein remodelling. Her website is http://mol-evol.org/
The first talk of the conference this year is by Laura Landweber – this is the “Nei” lecture, named after Masatoshi Nei a co-founder of the society (along with Walter Fitch). Laura’s talk title is “Life with 16,000 chromosomes and reflections on 21st century women in science” and you can see more here: https://eventmobi.com/smbe/agenda/253568/1268987
In case you were wondering – its HOT HOT HOT in Texas in July.
It tells me that:
I’m attending A public goods perspective on evolution smbe17 https://eventmobi.com/smbe/agenda/253568/1266740
The conference “app” is a website. So far, I like it: https://eventmobi.com/smbe/
Great venue for the meeting.
The meeting next year in Japan looks really, really nice. Looking forward to that one.
Briefly went to the council meeting this morning to speak about how the local organisers in Manchester are getting on with SMBE 2019.
Arrived in Austin, TX yesterday. Huge number of smbe17 people on the flight from Heathrow to Austin. Conference website is http://smbe2017.org/
Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis speaking about proto genes and selective effects that they confer.
Most important protogene effect correlates with length – long genes are more toxic. This is what she calls a ‘non-genic’ effect of proto genes.