SimBiotic Articles and Blog

My previous post concerned an apparently beneficial genetic variant, common in modern humans, that some researchers suspect we picked up via sex with Neanderthals. Attempts to find direct evidence that Neanderthals carried the variant have so far been unsuccessful. But other cases of beneficial variants acquired via hybiridization do exist. This is, for example, how the gray wolves of Yellowstone got their black pelts.

The publication last month of a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome stoked quite a bit of excitement, much of it over the question of whether Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans ever indulged in hanky-panky. The query I want to focus on here is more specific. It concerns how modern humans acquired a particular allele for a particular gene. Did we get it from a Neanderthal during a romantic evening?

Science is becoming more collaborative over time, and one trend in science education is to try and reflect that cultural change in the classroom. An essay in a recent issue of Nature (March 25, 2010) got me thinking about how the culture of scientific collaboration is not uniform, and what that means for our choice in the classroom.

We use research to help design our virtual laboratories. Some studies we do on our own, but for many we need help from faculty willing to try a lab in their classes, and a new study on our latest genetics lab is one of those.