Microbial Population Biology

Hope you all enjoyed the seminar by Inga Sidor of the Mystic Aquarium regarding Brucellosis in Marine Mammals: Investigating Diagnostics and Disease.
Please comment on the seminar material by commenting on this post.
I’ve done a bit of Brucella homework to give you all a bit more background.  Check out:
Brucella population structure and host specificity from [...]

Dear all,
As promised tomorrow will involve an intensive review on effects of HGT in microbial genomes. For Thursday, please read the classic paper of Travisano, Mongold, and Lenski (Science 1995), which is posted under Assignments. For your blog this week, please:
1) Post a note in which you discuss your interpretation of the [...]

Dear all,
I understand that Steffen led today’s lecture given my flu-induced absence.  As I’m sure you didn’t want to share a small room with my contagion I figured you didn’t mind.  I apologize for my absence in any case.
To clarify our plans for Thursday, I will present a lecture that integrates some of the material [...]

http://www.esalenctr.org/display/confpage.cfm?confid=10&pageid=105&pgtype=1

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0411/feature1/multimedia/index.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/

I posted the review article in assignments for any of you who want to get a head start this weekend.

Hi gang,
First, a reminder to consider the Cohan and Perry review carefully and post on your blog about how best to use technology to support a THEORY-based method of bacterial taxonomy. What other criteria should be included, if any, and why?
Second, I promised a follow-up paper that examined the problem of bacterial genome sequence [...]

There is a great post about bacterial evolution by Carl Zimmer on this site. You guys should check it out http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2005/07/08/tangling_the_tree.php

A. Why do we need a theory?

The need for common language
Practical needs for tracking/ID
Need to explain why divergence occurs (or not)
Periodic selection: sweep of beneficial alleles/homogenizing w/in a niche/diversifying between niches
Genetic drift: a sampling issue, alleles are lost due to random events/mutations decease diversity within populations (but population diversity can go up before fixation [...]

Dear MicroPopBio students,
In the spirit of keeping this class current, I’ve assigned one of the latest papers on “The Species Question” by the leading expert on this question, Fred Cohan.
Please read this article for tomorrow, and by the end of this week, write a blog post that outlines a set of criteria you would recommend [...]