John Logsdon

I opened an account at the other place @johnlogsdon.bsky.social I’m gonna stay here for a while at least. But I’m covering my bases.

@phylogenomics Well played, Jonathan! Would be a great title for a redux analysis.

@johnlogsdon Ahh - a BLAST from the past ...

Back in the day, I spent a lot of effort pointing out that many claims of lateral gene transfer between taxa were better explained by other phenomena, like gene loss, duplicaiton and deletion, convergence, bad informatics, etc 1/n

@phylogenomics Looking forward to reading that paper!

But it is also frequently over-estiamted. Thus I would suggest people look at this new paper (not by me) on this topic: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ec… "Reassessing Interkingdom Horizontal Gene Transfer Suggests Limited Influence on Plant Genomes" 3/n

@phylogenomics Ditto. The emperor has no clothes is a hard gig in science.

I stopped doing this largely because it became tiring. This does not mean that I think lateral gene transfer is unimportant - it is incredibly important and plays a major role in evolution in many taxa. 2/n

@RussellMorris @Bunnymen I came here to say that.

@Bunnymen Please release this great album on vinyl. Thanks.

On this day in 2009 we released the album The Fountain. 🐰⛲️

Please join us in wishing Bryan Ferry a very happy birthday today! #bryanferry #happybirthday #onthisday

The only rule in biology is that there are exceptions to every rule. This is what makes biology infinitely exciting; even when you think you’ve got the complete view, the floor can drop out from underneath you at any given moment. Case-in-point: The nucleus is the thing that makes eukaryotes...well, eukaryotes. It's the part of the cell that stores the genome, separating DNA from the cytoplasm and other organelles. (Bacteria do not have nuclei.) For decades, scientists thought that each nucleus contains one or more haploid sets of chromosomes. But there are exceptions. Red blood cells, for example, don’t have nuclei at all. (They expel their nuclei during maturation to maximize hemoglobin concentrations.) Cells in the eye lens, too, lose their nuclei and organelles during differentiation, thus becoming transparent. And so on. But now there is yet ANOTHER exception to this rule, and it’s one I hadn’t seen before. For a study in Science, researchers discovered that two types of pathogenic fungi that infect plants, called Sclerotinia sclerotiorum and Botrytis cinerea, have two different nuclei. And instead of storing a full set of chromosomes in each nuclei, they instead “distribute their chromosomes such that each of their nuclei contains only a subset of the haploid chromosomes.” The authors confirmed this by throwing a kitchen sink of methods at these cells; chromosome counting, DNA measurements using flow cytometry, single-nucleus PCR, and more. Nobody knows why the fungi do this, but the scientists claim (in their discussion) that it could enable them "to respond and adapt more effectively to local environmental stresses within their extensive mycelial networks. Nuclear shuffling may facilitate the rapid generation of new genotypes, enhancing adaptability to changing environments.” There is also evidence that the chromosomes within each nucleus may briefly collide during cell division, before going back into their separate nuclei. This is a great paper. It is simple, to the point, and challenges the status quo. It has serious potential to become a “classic” of the genre. Link: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

20 hours later and your voice mail box is still full. Do your job @SenJoniErnst and at least pretend to listen to your constituents. @joniernst

Also @joniernst

Hello @SenJoniErnst Constituent here. I unsuccessfully tried to leave you a message today on your voice mailbox. 202 224 3254. It was full.

@markowenmartin Same!

@johnlogsdon I have stories. But he was always nice to me.

I know it isn’t about bacteria and archaea. But the title makes me smile.

@markowenmartin He was on my dissertation committee. Always interesting. Usually stubborn.

@johnlogsdon I know. We always chatted about that.

@fredguterl @LeeBillings @sciam It’s happened before. It will again. :-)

Who is Jared Isaacman, Trump's pick to lead NASA? Find out more in my story for @sciam (link follows below).

New paper out in @ScienceMagazine! In 8 studies (multiple platforms, methods, time periods) we find: misinformation evokes more outrage than trustworthy news, when it does it's shared more + ppl are less likely to read before sharing. w/ @killianmcl1 @Klonick @mollycrockett 🧵👇

@graychid I’m double dipping until 20 Jan at least.

@graychid Great record. Underrated. Coming over to Bluesky soon? The water (and music) are fine.

@PatDolan53 Ha. Do you have one? It wouldn’t qualify anyway, as it is “concert t-shirt Friday” here’s one I won’t be wearing.

I teach a large (~600 students) lecture class on Introductory Biology. Friday is “concert t-shirt day”. I wear one of my (many) band shirts and ask students to wear theirs and tell me about it. Psychedelic Furs was last Friday. Tomorrow?

@mbeisen Sabbatical.

Is there a German word for not wanting to go to work because you're so filled with rage and disappointment at your colleagues for being unprincipled cowards?