Scientists Measure How Quickly Plant Genes Mutate 67
eldavojohn writes "A recent study puts observed numbers on genome mutations in plants. This kind of research is becoming more popular in understanding evolution. The research 'followed all genetic changes in five lines of the mustard relative Arabidopsis thaliana that occurred during 30 generations. In the genome of the final generation they then searched for differences to the genome of the original ancestor.' A single generation has about a one in 140 million chance of mutating any letter of the genome (which has about 120 million base pairs). Sound like bad odds? From the article, 'if one starts to consider that they occur in the genomes of every member of a species, it becomes clear how fluid the genome is: In a collection of only 60 million Arabidopsis plants, each letter in the genome is changed, on average, once. For an organism that produces thousands of seeds in each generation, 60 million is not such a big number at all.' The academic paper is available in Science, though seeing more than the abstract requires a subscription."
evolution ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Plants don't evolve, they get changed by the touch of his noodly appendages
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I bet that you didn't see the "Insightful" coming up.
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there are climate scientists trying to disprove global warming, but they fail,... what does THAT tell you?
It tells me that you can't prove a negative.
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I thought global warming was just observed fact, and the thing that is trying to be proven is the actual cause of it. Actually though, because of the strange climate we have here, global warming is only going to make my country colder at first. Hah.
Re:evolution ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bonus points for introducing a second unrelated hot topic.
What I want to know is the impact of gay marriage, and dating co-workers on all this.
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If you are having troubling proving negative hypothesis A ... try proving "not A".
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I know that the creationists and the anti-climate change groups are different, however.... what do you expect when you are dealing with people who espouse the idea of "irreducible complexity"?
Creationism and climate change scepticism are distinguished precisely by the practical role of "irreducible complexity" in each field. Evolution is demonstrably highly reducible to nothing more than the laws of probability. We have endless amounts of experimental and observation evidence to that effect, to the point
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Young Earth Creationists are actually more consistent than Old Earth Creationists because the former merely have to invoke a great big miracle: the Earth was created with the appearance of being old 6000 years ago, implying just that God is a liar, a charlatan and a cheat. If Young Earth Creationists admit that then they have an unassailable albeit insane argument. Old Earth Creationists on the other hand have to accept what physics, chemistry and geology tell us about the age of the Earth, while denying the laws of probability, which isn't even remotely self-consistent.
I don't get this at all. The Young Earth Creationists have a huge inconsistency to explain. Why God chose to make a young Earth appear old. Also from the point of view of effort, that's quite a bit of effort to go through. In comparison, the Old Earth Creationists need explain nothing, not even the laws of probability. It's a perfectly unfalsifiable theory.
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AGW Data and Methods from CRU/NASA/other researchers. Enjoy. [realclimate.org]
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It tells me that you can't prove a negative.
You most certainly can prove a negative, and scientists do so all the time. The argument is generally of the form, "If X is true, the phenomenon Y must be observed under conditions Z. We have created conditions Z, proved by positive calibration that if Y occurred we would see it. Therefore X is false."
Only people who are completely ignorant of exactly the kind of experimental science that has driven our understanding of the universe in the past century would cl
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Yea, I took symbolic logic too. In your example you've proven that the conditions you believe represent Z did not produce Y. So either you didn't really produce condition Z (even though you thought you did), or your assumptions are wrong. But none of that matters, nor does it matter that some people cling to a supernatural explanation of what they observe in the real world.
What's more important is whether transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from developed countries to less developed countries [newsdaily.com] is a
Re:evolution ? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny the people warning us about one world (elected)government don't issue warnings about our (unelected)corporate overlords.
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That's probably because they (the one-world-government-warning people) probably consider themselves to be likely members of the corporate overlord group, not of the boot-trampled masses. That's capitalism for you.
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Because they are the same thing! Duh!
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You most certainly can prove a negative, and scientists do so all the time.
Um, no, they don't.
Scientists never "prove" negative statements. They falsify (ie, provide counter-evidence for) positive statements.
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Negating a positive statement yields another positive statement: "There are elephants in my office" becomes "There are no elephants in my office", which is an assertion susceptible to falsification (i.e., looking for and finding no elephants in my office). Thus, I've proved a negative.
The slogan "you can't prove a negative" is meaningless outside a fairly narrow use in logic.
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Proving a negative is more like, "There have never been elephants in my office" without a 100% accurate historical record.
And "There will never be elephants in my office" could be proved only by destroying the office.
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Your example is correct, but it doesn't have to do with negatives. It's as hard to prove the statement "there have always been elephants in my office" without the same 100% accurate historical record (more plausibly, and as difficult to prove, "All life on Earth is carbon-based").
Re:evolution ? (Score:5, Informative)
Scientists are always trying to disprove. 'proving' a new theory is much harder than disproving the most widely adopted theories. see 'falsifiability' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability [wikipedia.org]
Enough Already ! (Score:5, Insightful)
The academic paper is available in Science, though seeing more than the abstract requires a subscription
I thought this was "news for nerds, stuff that matters", not "Science magazine touting for subscriptions".
If we can't even RTFA without paying first, then it has no place on this site IMHO, as we have all come to realize that TFS is at best "a summary", and at worst, complete BS.
Re:Enough Already ! (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like you might be interested in this exciting new media access concept!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library [wikipedia.org]
Re:Enough Already ! (Score:5, Funny)
Morpheus
This is the construct. It's our loading program. We can load anything from clothing, to equipment, weapons, training simulations, anything we need. But if you want to read a Science article linked from Slashdot, you'll have to get on the bus and nip down to the local library.
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Oh, come on, you can't expect us to be able to computerize everything! Accessing magazine articles online has been a very tough problem to solve, due to the inherent difficulties in the process. Enjoy the advances we have made
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Morpheus
This is the construct. It's our loading program. We can load anything from clothing, to equipment, weapons, training simulations, anything we need. But if you want to read a Science article linked from Slashdot, you'll have to get on the bus and nip down to the local library.
Wasn't that the entire plot of the movie? They couldn't jack in from their comfy cave complex.
Re:Enough Already ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot regularly reports on new products costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands. You don't get to use the product (particularly if it's hardware) without paying for it, yet many more people will talk about it than will pony up the cash.
If you want to read the article without a subscription, you can do so for fifteen bucks. If you're in school, or know anyone who is, there's a good chance you can do so for free.
For those of us in bioinformatics, this kind of thing is our bread and butter. Don't dismiss this as "not news for nerds" just because it doesn't happen to relate to one of the particular kinds of nerdiness about which you care enough to pay a small amount of money.
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I don't care to pay *any* amount of money for nerd news, that's why I'm here in the first place.
Having essentially a "free" news for nerds site, then linking it to paid-only subscription articles kind of defeats the purpose, wouldn't you agree ?
Which was my original point and seems to have got lost. It's not about whether or not I'm prepared to pay X amount to get Y information, it's about the fact that this is supposedly a "free" site.
It's the same kind of scam which means when I search for "free software"
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Slashdot calls itself "news for nerds," not "free stuff for nerds." There is no requirement that linked information be free. It's nice when it is, of course, but that's a bonus.
Again, do you have a problem with articles that discuss proprietary hardware or software? You can't, I hope you'll agree, get complete information on the latest offering from, say, Apple or Oracle, without buying and using it.
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I don't care to pay *any* amount of money for nerd news, that's why I'm here in the first place.
You got the news - "Scientists Measure How Quickly Plant Genes Mutate". Even more so, you got some numbers - 1:1,4*10^8 per gen. This is news.
What you are asking is "Science papers for nerds", or maybe you want a free book with book review.
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Are scientists so greedy, they need each person to pay 15$ for a fucking glance to what they are doing?
Any research institution worth the name will have a site license for the journal. The rest of you should try googling for a preprint...
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The thing here though is that it's printed in a refereed journal, specifically Science, that is a really big deal to most scientists. The scientists are plenty willing to let their paper be published in a journal that costs money to have the ability to put 'Science' on thei
Not their fault: scientific publishing model sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
A scientist's career and a department's funding are entirely dependent on their reputation, which is almost completely dependant on getting your work published in high profile (a.k.a "high impact factor") journals. In order for these journals to accept amd publish your work, you have to
So what? (Score:2)
Slashdot posts news stories about hardware that you can't get your hands on without paying for it. It posts reviews of books that you can't read without paying for them (short of going to a library). Why should it be any different for a scientific journal that happens to have an online edition? The news is the discovery. The article happens to contain more information about the methods, data, and the findings. So what if it costs money to read it? Isn't supporting the scientific community worth someth
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You wouldn't buy a house without seeing inside first and having a full structural survey done.
You wouldn't buy a car without test driving it first, and having the engine checked over thoroughly by a mechanic.
But you say to me, "Here's an article on Science, it's really interesting, honest. But if you want to know the nitty-gritty, you'll have to pony up 15 bucks first" ?
The Honest Indian Business Model is a bit outdated, don't you think ?
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You wouldn't buy the article AFTER reading the whole thing and knowing what it already says, either, would you? Ah!
I guess scientists should spend years studying and researching and publish their findings for free, and for dinner they can eat the rainbows that shoot out of your butt.
If you're casually interested in the topic, probably you don't want to bother paying money for it. Bitch about it if you want to; the unfair world doesn't publish scientific findings for free and hand deliver them to your do
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I guess scientists should spend years studying and researching and publish their findings for free, and for dinner they can eat the rainbows that shoot out of your butt.
Well, that might be better than the current situation, where in order to get published by a reputable journal they must give up their copyrights for free and agree to not publish their own works elsewhere, and for dinner they eat the funding that they begged for in order to do the research, which funding they will probably not get without the prestige of having articles published in a reputable journal that charges you money for reading but pays no money to the scientist for writing, depending on how good t
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WTF!? IANAL but AFAIK on Slashdot, RTFA-ing is BS! LMAO!
I'm sorry,,, I'll leave now....
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Not reading TFA and not being *able* to read the TFA without paying first, are two different things ;-)
I'm really just trying to shame them into not linking to paid articles, so then I can safely ignore TFA, and in principle, save myself 15 bucks in the process ;-)
(For those with sleepy neuron deficiency, the above *IS* sarcasm).
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As far as wilful misinterpretation goes, you have to worry a lot more about the creationists on this one than the "greenies." It doesn't really affect the environmentalist viewpoint in any meaningful way, but it requires the more sophisticated creationists to move the goalposts again to maintain the artificial "microevolution/macroevolution" dichotomy they're so enamored of.
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Nobody is "taxing your ass off to save flies." If you think they are, you've been sadly misinformed.
Re:Oh great. (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the rest, nobody is going to claim that each individual is a species. You've constructed a rather unconvincing straw man to hijack an interesting article, because you have a problem with some imaginary "greenies".
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Very eloquently said, Sir. Consider my face shut, at least for the next 8 hours.
Perhaps tomorrow you'll learn the difference between the Reply button at the top of the page, and the Reply button under my actual post(s) ?
huh? (Score:2)
With four different DNA letters, there are six possible changes . . .
Can anyone explain this? Are they saying that a change from, say, for example, T to A is the same as a change from A to T? Are they just wrong? Or is there some good explanation that eludes me?
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Wikipedia has a better explanation of the genetic code [wikipedia.org]. It's probably better to understand that
in just about every species, groups of three letters form a codon [bioephemera.com], which defines a particular amino acid, of which there are 30 or so, but most species only seem to use around 24, along with a STOP command.
Some funky stuff goes on, with some DNA being used in reverse, or offset by one or two letters, so that you get six possible sequences from the same set of letters.
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First the "six possible changes" is only referring to single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which is the substitution of on one base for another. There are more complex alteration, insertions, deletions, inversions, etc. are not counted among these six. For a SNP to become "fixed", that is stably maintained through subsequent replication cycles you have the initial mutation event (altering a base) but then you must also have the complementary substitution on the other strand of the double helix. If an
Great piece of work! (Score:5, Informative)
Our current understanding of how dynamic a genome is, the types of changes that occur, and the factors that limit these changes is very limited. Much of this is because getting a genome of an organism can be expensive and laborious, depending on the size of the genome (RNA virus 15,000 nt, DNA virus: 150,000 nt, bacteria: 5,000,000 nt, yeast: 20,000,000 nt, multicellular organisms: 100,000,000-10,000,000,000). Since our understanding of how genomes evolve depend on getting genomes sequenced that are appropriately related to one another (e.g. populations of organisms versus diversity of organisms), we can only get answers for those genomes we currently have (current ~8000 for all viruses, bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). Fortunately, there is currently a major technological revolution happening in biology: generating DNA sequences fast and cheap. For example, the first human genome was approx a 10 year project and cost ~$1,000,000,000. Now, the record for a human genome takes less than a week and costs ~$15,000.
This project is a major milestone as the authors sequenced 6 plant genomes (a mustard known as Arabidopsis thaliana) that are related to one another by 30 generations. Because of the close evolutionary relationships of these organisms, the authors can characterize the types of genomic change happening over very short time periods.
The emerging picture is that genomes, the fundamental genetic blueprint for a lineage of organisms, are much more dynamic than we had previously thought.
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Can this data really be extrapolated beyond the genomes of the plants for which they have gathered data though?
The summary suggests 1 in 60 million for a plant that produces thousands of seeds isn't such a big number, but in contrast, take a plant like Carnegia gigantea which produces around 60 million seeds a year, but which is lucky to have even one of those survive beyond a few weeks if it even germinates at all, for species like this, it's still a big number. For these sorts of species then, we have a 1
A question about Lenski's work. (Score:1)
Has the DNA Sequencing been done on his E. Coli?
If so, What was found?
If not, when do we expect it?
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Absolutely stunning piece of work:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7268/full/nature08480.html [nature.com]
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I thought I remembered that, but I couldn't find it. Don't know why. I don't have access to Nature, and $32 is too much money to me just to find out if the article talks about how the Cit+ E. Coli came about genetically.
Did they discuss this mutation in this article? The abstract doesn't even mention the Cit+ E. Coli.
I wonder if they found the answer to Lenski's question near the end of his 2008 paper: "What physiological mechanism has evolved that allows aerobic growth on citrate?"
Is that discussed
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