Cyanobacteria Are Far From Just Toledo’s Problem

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The New York Times, August 7, 2014

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Over the weekend, an entire city was brought to its knees by pond scum.

Toledo, Ohio, gets its drinking water from the western end of Lake Erie. A bloom of bacteria formed there last week, producing a dangerous toxin called microcystin. City officials warned half a million residents against drinking municipal water. At high doses, the toxin can cause liver failure.

The microbes that terrorized Toledo, known as cyanobacteria, are actually a worldwide menace.

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The Quantified Microbiome Self

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THE MICROBES IN ONE GRAD STUDENT’S GUT OVER A YEAR. FROM DAVID ET AL 2014

Some of my friends are sporting wristbands these days that keep track of their bodies. Little computers nestled in these device inside record the steps they take each day, the beats of their heart, the length of their slumbers. At the end of each day, they can sit down at a computer and look at their data arrayed across a screen like a seismogram of flesh.

I got one of these devices as a gift recently. But as much as I enjoy wasting time with technology, I just didn’t care enough to put it on my wrist. I already know that I should run more, walk more, stand more, and avoid sitting in front of monitors more. I don’t need granular data to remind me of that.

But as I read the journal Genome Biologythe journal Genome Biology today, I decided that someday I might surrender to the Quantified Self movement. I’ll just have to wait till I can track my trillions of microbes from one day to the next.

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Hot Flies and Mosaic Parents

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In the past couple weeks, I’ve been checking back in with a couple of my favorite lines of scientific research in my New York Times column.

–Last week, I wrote about how life will (or won’t) adapt to climate change. A new experiment suggests that some species may have more potential to evolve resistance to the new conditions than previously thought. But we don’t know if that will be enough.

This is just one way in which we humans are now driving evolution in new directions. Here’s a video of a lecture I gave on the subject a few months ago at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum:

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Having More Than One Set of DNA Carries Legacy of Risk

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The New York Times, July 31, 2014

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The family seemed to defy the rules of genetics.

When Meriel M. McEntagart, a geneticist at St. George’s University of London, met the family in May 2012, she suspected that three of the children had a rare genetic disorder called Smith-Magenis syndrome. They had many of the symptoms of the disease, such as trouble sleeping through the night. Dr. McEntagart confirmed that diagnosis with a genetic test. The children were all missing an identical chunk of a gene known as RAI1.

One of the children had a different father from the other two, and so the mother could be the only source of their altered gene.

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Study Gives Hope of Adaptation to Climate Change

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The New York Times, July 24, 2014

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As we pour heat-trapping gases into the air, we’re running an experiment. We’re going to see what a rapidly changing climate does to the world’s biodiversity — how many species shift to new ranges, how many adapt to their new environment and how many become extinct.

We don’t have a very good idea of how the experiment will turn out. Scientists are coming to appreciate that there’s a lot about how climate affects life that they still don’t understand. That’s true, it turns out, even for species that scientists have been studying carefully for years.

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