Microbial Population Biology

This is an odd but temporarily convenient place to put this schedule. The MCBS seminar schedule for the remainder of Fall 2008 is as follows:
Tuesdays
Oct. 28 Erin Allgood “The effect of diet and polybrominated diphenyl ether exposure on whole body and adipocyte metabolism in male Wistar rats”
Nov. 4 Cliff Rosen
Nov. 11 Veteran’s Day [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In doing some housekeeping I realized that I never posted these slides.  Here they are for your reference. 713-lecture-7-viral-cooperation-defection.ppt
713-lecture-8-myxo-behavior.ppt

Hi gang,
Back in the saddle again for me, but you have all been doing some serious work in the meantime. From your blog entries, I see that you raised two families of questions about the Rainey et al. work:
1) Are phenotypically similar (but perhaps not identical)  morphs that occupy the same niche (WS) functionally and/or [...]

In today’s class, I asked you to, with little prior knowledge of what experimental evolution really is, to brainstorm an experimental evolution project in ~10 minutes.  I also asked you to define what your hypotheses and predictions are.
Here is what you came up with:
Nick/Jon          HGT via plasmids; plasmid has Ab resistance
H: Plasmid transfer will improve [...]

Hi all,
For this week we’ll review phylogenetic methods, as described in the Holder and Lewis review, learn more generally about experimental evolution methods, as reviewed by me, and then spend the rest of the time focusing on the question:
What are the effects of chance and history on adaptation and evolution, in general?
I point you to [...]