Tasmanian Devil
Scooped
24/09/10 15:53
Pennsylvania State University's Stephan Schuster and his colleagues were scooped after their work on sequencing the cacao genome and the Tasmanian devil was upstaged by rivals' announcements in the press while they were waiting until after their work went through peer review to promote it. S. Pelech comments that most scientists have been "scooped" at some stage of their careers, and rather than celebrating individual scientists that are the first to report a big discovery, perhaps we should recognize more those who have a long track record of scientific contribution and achievement. Read More...
Devils' Disease and Diversity
25/03/11 13:37 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Pennsylvania State University's Stephan Schuster and his colleagues aim in a conservation effort called "Project Ark" to help save the endangered Tasmanian devil — whose population is dwindling due to the rapid spread of a species-specific infectious cancer, devil tumor facial disease — using a genomics-based approach to genotype up to 500 Tasmanian devils. S. Pelech comments that with about 40% of the world's estimated 10 million species of life facing extinction, one of the real bonuses of plummeting genome-wide sequencing costs is the possibility it offers to remediate some of the damage that humankind has wrought on this planet in the future. The advantage of a database with the full sequences of thousands of diverse genomes is that it can be easily copied on a wide-scale onto small storage devices for broad dissemination, even into space. Read More...