Science, August 7, 2009

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You may not feel as though you have much in common with a toadstool, but its cells and ours are strikingly similar. Animals and fungi both keep their DNA coiled up in a nucleus. Their genes are interspersed with chunks of DNA that cells have to edit out to make proteins. Those proteins are shuttled through a maze of membranes before they can float out into the cell. A cell in a toadstool, like your own cells, manufactures fuel in compartments called mitochondria. Both species’ cells contain the same molecular skeleton, which they can break down and reassemble in order to crawl.

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Yale Environment 360, August 3, 2009

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In 1997, Arthur Weis found himself with an extra bucket of seeds. Weis, who was teaching at the University of California at Irvine at the time, had dispatched a student, Sheina Sim, to gather some field mustard seeds for a study. When Sim was done with her research, Weis was left with a lot of leftover seeds. For no particular reason, he decided not to throw the bucket out. “We just tossed it in a cold, dry incubator,” said Weis.

Weis is glad they did. When a severe drought struck southern California, Weis realized that he could use the extra bucket of seeds for an experiment. In 2004 he and his colleagues collected more field mustard seeds from the same sites that Sim had visited seven years earlier.

Continue reading “First Comes Global Warming, Then an Evolutionary Explosion” →