My thursday roundup

All is well with my tissue culture. I didn’t completely botch yesterday’s experiment (I mean all clear buffers should be ok!!!), so I’m taking some time to do read stuff that catches my eye today.

From this week’s Nature and Nature alert:

1) The platypus genome was just published. It was very interesting to see that the genome in a way reflected the major physical characteristics of the platypus. There were conserved genome regions that are similar to reptiles, birds and mammals. This isn’t something I’m normally too interested in, as I don’t have the resources to look at all this data or the knowledge to reasonably interpret it, but platypuses are just so weird, I thought it would be worth mentioning.

2) An interesting PNAS article dealing with bacterial symbionts of surgeonfish that belong to the Epulopiscium spp.