Field of Science

A bit of a break...

Rather swamped with stuff right now - research, class (final next week x_x), other misc stuff. Probably would be best to stay away from the internet as much as I can for the next week or so... that may prove to be difficult. Oh well...

Oh and to top it all off, I think the star alignment is incorrect for PCR these days. May have to wait for them to shift a little so that the PCR prayer waves can reach their destination and make my Taq do its job. Or perhaps its governed by Chaos/Quantum whatever theory stuff BS. Srsly - exact same primers, reagents, temperature, program, machine... similar samples, and one day they work perfectly, the very next round there's no product. WTF? HELP! I need this to work like 3 days ago... argh.

For now, here's a random preview of a post I will finish eventually very soon ^.^

I de-Cavalier-Smithified and combined a couple of his diagrams into what may hopefully be read and understood by a normal human being. The protistology TA instructed me to avoid ever using Tom's diagrams in talks, even after I redrew it.

Here's one of the originals (very typical TC-S):

(Cavalier-Smith 2009 Predation and eukaryote cell origins: a coevolutionary perspective. Int J Biochem & Cell Biol 41:307-322; can't find free access pdf anywhere yet =( )

His phylogenies are even better...!

Hopefully explanation will soon follow...

PS: Just noticed something weird... why does Tom have animals and fungi branching out of 'Choanozoa'? Do 'Choanozoa' include nucleariids and ichtyosporeans too? What do those have to do with choanoflagellates anyway? As far as I know, that region looks something like this:

{Nucleariids + Fungi} {Ichtyosporea [Choanoflagellates + Animals]}; 'Choanozoa' would be a rather awkward group, no?

/pedantry; Damn, now I sound like a cladist...

1 comment:

  1. Yep, "Choanozoa" for Cavalier-Smith is any opisthokont that is not an animal or a fungus. And as well as the ones you mentioned, there's also Capsaspora and Corallochytrium floating around in there somewhere.

    I actually like C-S's trees - it's a lot easier than hunting down pertinent characters through the text (especially Cavalier-Smith-style text). I can see why they wouldn't work as part of a presentation, though - you need a bit of time to take things in.

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