Blog Comments

Kinetica Online is pleased to provide direct links to commentaries from our senior editor Dr. Steven Pelech has posted on other blogs sites. Most of these comments appear on the GenomeWeb Daily Scan website, which in turn highlight interesting blogs that have been posted at numerous sites in the blogosphere since the beginning of 2010. A wide variety of topical subjects are covered ranging from the latest scientific breakthroughs, research trends, politics and career advice. The original blogs and Dr. Pelech’s comments are summarized here under the title of the original blog. Should viewers wish to add to these discussions, they should add their comments at the original blog sites.

The views expressed by Dr. Pelech do not necessarily reflect those of the other management and staff at Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation. However, we wish to encourage healthy debate that might spur improvements in how biomedical research is supported and conducted.

Phylogenomics

We Remember Memorizing That

Lawrence David and Eric Alm at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a new phylogenomic approach called AnGST — for analyzer of gene and species trees — that they used to study the evolutionary histories of nearly 4,000 gene families and observed that genes first appearing during this Archaean expansion (between 3.33 and 2.85 billion years ago) are commonly involved in electron-transport and respiratory pathways, which was probably spurred on by the increases in toxic oxygen in the atmosphere. S. Pelech comments that such strategies can be extended towards the more ambitious goal of deducing the origins of life by focusing on the functional domains found in the proteins encoded by genes, which can then be used to elucidation of a "molecular" tree of life. Read More...