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 [...]

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

As promised, we will move from our discussion of the evolution of sex to one focused on the evolution of cooperation and cheating.  Whether this is an appropriate segue is certainly debatable.
I have posted three articles for this week, all discussing the evolution of cooperation and cheating in RNA phage phi-6, and all written by [...]

Dear class,
On Tuesday 10/23 we will complete discussion of the evolution of specialization (my work) and begin discussion of the evolution of mutation rates. To support this discussion, please read, for this week, the articles posted on the Assignments page:
http://micropopbio.org/cooper/2007/10/22/evolution-of-mutation-rates/
Enjoy! And remember that we’ll finish up early tomorrow to pick colonies isolated from [...]

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 [...]

Dear class,
Here are the slides for Lecture 4 on phylogenetic methods and for Lecture 5 on experimental evolution.
713-lecture-4-phylogeny.ppt
713-lecture-5-experimental-evolution.ppt
Cheers,
Vaughn

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 [...]