SciFri Talk at The Natural History Museum

On October 28th, 2016, Prof. McInerney gave a talk at The Natural History Museum, London on the subject of “Network Thinking”.  The specific title for the talk was “The dominant role of mergers in evolutionary history” and the talk took place in the Neil Chalmers seminar room.

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Prof. McInerney Becomes A Fellow of The Linnean Society

15th September 2016   Professor McInerney officially became an elected Fellow of the Linnean society of London at a meeting of the society on Thursday September 15th, 2016. Pictured is Prof. McInerney signing the register at an evening meeting of the society. Founded in 1788, the Society takes its name from the Swedish naturalist Carl […]

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Prof. McInerney Speaks At The University of Tübingen, Germany

Professor McInerney gave a research seminar at the University of Tübingen, Germany on November 24th. The title of the seminar was “Merging of biological objects of different kinds is a major evolutionary process”. The seminar was held at the Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine and was followed by a session of questions and answers.

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Professor McInerney Elected to American Academy of Microbiology

The American Academy of Microbiology have elected Prof. McInerney to its membership. According to the American Society for Microbiology, which is the awarding body: Each elected Fellow has built an exemplary career in basic and applied research, teaching, clinical and public health, industry or government service. Election to Fellowship indicates recognition of distinction in microbiology […]

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Short News and Views Article Published In Nature

A recent comment from the lab was published in Nature in the News and Views Section on the evolution of developmental genes in animals. With the sequencing of sponge genomes, if is becoming obvious that the standard view of the evolutionary history of developmental genes is somewhat over-simplified.  Sponges have ParaHox, NK and possibly HOX genes, […]

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Eukaryote Origins

In the last five years, there has been tremendous progress made in understanding the origin of the eukaryote cell. This progress has been on a number of fronts – phylogenetic, metabolic and bioenergetic and in terms of other data that relate directly to evolution. Our latest paper in PNAS is, I feel, the latest in […]

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Leading Scientists Comment on Irish Research Policy

Last Thursday night I went to a lecture in Harvard by Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel prizewinner, 2001 and current president of the Royal Society.  The theme of his talk was “Science and Government” and he spoke about two things – how we should identify the best science to support and how science should be presented […]

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Our letter in the Irish Times today

Here I reproduce our letter in the Irish Times:   Sir, – Ireland’s poor success rate in winning grants from the European Research Council (Business+Technology, August 16th) comes as no surprise to many of us in the Irish scientific community, given recent warnings from a number of international funding agencies. What is of particular concern […]

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The five biggest evolutionary transitions?

Have been thinking recently about what the five biggest evolutionary transitions might be.  Naturally, there are several transitions and indeed it is arguable that at every speciation event, there has been a transition – indeed at every mutational event, even. But which ones are the biggest?  Also, in this vein – what evolves and what […]

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Pervasive horizontal gene transfer in Chlamydia

The genome era has really taught us something impressive about the plasticity of bacterial genomes. Gene exchange between strains of the same species and gene exchange between different species is not limited to special categories of genes and is not limited to ‘oddball’ species.  It is pervasive, frequent and it is also a public health […]

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Two conferences in Colorado in one week

The research unit decamped to Colorado this week to attend the first MMPE (Molecular Mechanisms of Protein Evolution), which was held in the University of Colorado Denver medical school and the 12th ISCB Regional Meeting, which was held in Snowmass Colorado in the Silvertree Hotel. Speaking at the meeting were: Dr. Davide Pisani, Dr. James […]

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H-Index, M-Index and google citations

Today I downloaded and installed the r program for analysing Google Scholar citation metrics (you can pick it up here). There is a lot of talk about the various metrics being used to analyse the productivity of scientists and there seems to be no really good way to do it.  A simple point-statistic doesn’t do […]

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Survival of the sexiest

This is to announce that on Tuesday next (the 15th of November), there will be a talk given by Dr. James McInerney in JH2 in the John Hume Building at NUI Maynooth at 7:30pm, entitled:   Survival of the sexiest: Why females want a mate with a good sense of humour, a brightly coloured tail […]

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