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Merge ahead ⚠️

This #HubbleFriday image showcases the peculiar galaxy merger known as Arp-Madore 417-391.

At 671 million light-years away, this merger is the result of two galaxies that were distorted by gravity and twisted together into a ring: go.nasa.gov/3Vphfe5
#Hubble

Holy moly. This is gonna be a time sink of massive dimensions. Much of the Boston Public Library's vinyl collection digitized on archive.org

Lots of stuff you know and lots more you don't.

archive.org/details/vinyl_bost

#music #publiclibrary #vinyl #archiveorg

Culminating in this beautiful figure made by twitter.com/Bincoral - Posidonia retained most of the ethylene pathway (can make and receive), Amphibolis can only make, Zostera can do neither!
We think that has to do with their microbiome, Amphibolis might be feeding someone with ACC!

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From a cross-post convo on the other site with @cj_battey and others. How to find inversions? A short 🧵 .

The short answer is, it's hard.

Best bet is lots of crosses and genotyping to find markers in reverse order. But that's time consuming and expensive.

An increasingly good option is whole-genome assembly. Cheap long reads means we can now assembly a 2.5Gb maize genome for maybe ~$5K. Inversions are super easy to see in dotplots.

"The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth."

"People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.”

by Lewis Thomas, from "The Medusa and the Snail"

Watch a Salamander emerge From a Single Cell youtube.com/watch?v=SEejivHRIb

#DevBio

This paper has not gotten enough attention! We are moving towards large-scale genomics. They reannotated 488 genomes in a comparatve way!
"TOGA integrates gene annotation with orthology inference at scale"

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

We know phylogenomics can suffer from bias by annotation method: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/355887

I'm working on a similar solution, but only 283 genomes to start. Now I've got something to compare to. Mine will be a bit more #Rust-y, though.The possibilities are exciting.

TOGA integrates gene annotation with orthology inference at scale

Annotating coding genes and inferring orthologs are two classical challenges in genomics and evolutionary biology that have traditionally been approached separately, which limits scalability. We present TOGA, the first method that integrates gene annotation and orthology inference. TOGA implements a novel paradigm to infer orthologous genes, improves ortholog detection and annotation completeness compared to state-of-the-art methods, and handles even highly-fragmented assemblies. TOGA scales to hundreds of genomes, which we demonstrate by applying it to 488 placental mammal and 308 bird assemblies, creating the largest comparative gene resources so far. Additionally, TOGA detects gene losses, enables selection screens, and automatically provides a superior measure of mammalian genome quality. Together, TOGA is a powerful and scalable method to annotate and compare genes in the genomic era. 1 sentence Summary A scalable gene annotation approach using a novel paradigm to detect orthologous loci provides comparative data for hundreds of mammals and birds. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

www.biorxiv.org

#Introduction: I am an Associate Professor at UNC Charlotte studying the connection between #protein folding and disease.

When proteins are made in the cell, they come out as a string of amino acids. To function in the cell, this string needs to fold into a complex 3D shape. Many of our proteins need help to fold correctly. This is where molecular #chaperones come in. These proteins work as custodians of the cell by folding proteins. We work on the Hsp70 chaperone in yeast and cancer cells.

The latest: Now Raffensperger is dropping his appeal.

On the subject of Georgia, I'll be working again as a volunteer voter protection lawyer for the GA runoffs.

My contribution is to participate in what's called the boiler room handling problems that arise in polling places.

(I didn't sign up for Saturday though !!)

I've been doing volunteer voter protection legal work since 2016.

There are lots of other volunteer opportunities GA, some remote.

See: secure.ngpvan.com/okWijBNa7kiW

3/

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The NIH Advisory Committee to the Director is starting a working group on “Re-envisioning NIH-supported Postdoctoral Training.” Slide deck here has some data and details: acd.od.nih.gov/documents/prese

What would you like them to know? What would you like them to do?

🍄 "#Fungi at Home" 🍄

#SciArt by Ernst Friedrich Heyn (1841-1894) for The Natural History of Plants, Vol. 2 (1895) by Anton Kerner von Marilaun, translated from the original German by Francis Wall Oliver with the assistance of Mary Frances MacDonald and Marian Busk.

View in Biodiversity Heritage Library: biodiversitylibrary.org/page/1

#FungiFriday #mycology #mushrooms

When I was seven or eight, I was given a copy of the “Ladybird Book of Butterflies & Moths”. The idea was to record seeing each one of the several dozen varieties of butterfly and moths illustrated in the book and when you had ticked off all the varieties in the book, you could send off for a badge or a certificate, or something like that.
The area where I lived was particularly blessed with species variety in the butterfly world as it encompassed chalk down land, salt marsh, ancient woodland on clay soil and a variety of other habitats. This meant that I had little difficulty finding most of the butterflies in the book, but one particular species evaded me: the European swallowtail, “Papilio machaon”. This was not surprising as it is found, to this day, in the UK only around the Norfolk Broads and even there it is rather rare.
I pestered my mother for months to take me to somewhere where we would see a swallow tail and no matter how often she explained that the only place we would be likely to see one was, back in those days, 3/4 of a day's journey on the train. I was distraught; inconsolable, even! I cried, I sobbed, I begged, but all to no avail; in the end, I just had to accept that my ladybird book of butterflies would never be complete!
I had almost completely forgotten about the ladybird book of butterflies until a few months back when a swallowedtail butterfly appeared in my garden. I have never seen one before, nor since. It took me right back to my childhood and the gamut of emotions that I endured due to that damned book of butterflies.
The only problem I have now is “what the hell did I do with that sodding book?”


A yellow swallowtail butterfly feeding on the purple Buddleia blossom in my garden in Luxembourg. A rare species even over here!

“This article processing charge is to cover the costs of peer review, copyediting, typesetting, long-term archiving, and journal management.”

OK, it’s good that MDPI explicitly say what the are (supposedly) needed for. However:

is done for free, only the *management* of the peer review is done by the .
– Copyediting? What copyediting?
– Typesetting? There are LaTeX and Word templates, the is done by the authors, for free.
– Long-term archiving is done by the national library.

So, what remains is “journal management,” i.e., counting the money.

Thank you very much for the follows. I’m really loving this fab, gentle space! As a newbie I thought I would just introduce myself. I’ve always been very passionate about the natural world & became a #ForestSchool practitioner for this reason. In my spare time I am obsessed with #fungi #wildflowers & #NativeOrchids & try to recreate them in wool felt ( see pic) I love our wild flora, the bedrock upon which so much of our wildlife depends & I am proud to lead #WildFlowerHour every Sunday 8-9pm 🌿🌸

So, my initial impulse was to try to immediately recreate my birdplace experience, all of the same follows & -ers, over here. But then, maybe that’s not the point. Sure, there are certainly some journos & various voices I don’t want to lose track of. But maybe, just maybe I am missing an opportunity by not embracing the weird / uncomfortable / unknown fresh start of it all? I don’t know.
I’m 52, somehow on my first day at a brand new school.

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