I’m delighted to announce the arrival of a second salad spinner, this one purchased for $2 at Potter’s House, to the lab. We use these - with hot-glued PCR racks inside - as pre-PCR centrifuges. You can buy such things of course, Phenix Research has a small plate centrifuge for about $500 (and my refrigerated plate centrifuge for high-throughput DNA isolation and precipitation cost $15,000), but when all we need to do is get the bubbles out of our PCR mixes, the salad spinner does just fine!

I’m pleased to see my obsessive relationship with Tajima’s D coming to fruition: my paper will come out in Evolution in the next few months, indicating that despite our tendency to assume a data set is neutral until proven otherwise, the average mitochondrial data set does not behave the way this test of neutrality indicates it should. On the whole, there is a strong bias for negative values of Tajima’s D, suggesting we may need to re-think our nulls in evolutionary biology. However, it makes me nervous to put too much faith in this one analysis of one locus of course! Driving home from Asheville the other day I got very nervous that the effect noted in this paper: what if it is an effect of how researchers curate their data into NCBI? When I got home I checked, and there is a small “curation effect” but I think the biological effect is still strong. Hard to be confident when there are so many factors involved.

In other news, I’ve recognized just what a valuable resource is building up in my -80° freezer: several studies’ worth of DNA isolates, from seastars, isopods, barnacles, fishes, and so on. I’ve had a tendency to try and answer a question (grabbing new samples) and move on; but there is a lot more work to be done on all of those DNA samples. It was hard to get them, they are valuable, right?! So my next rotation student should expect to hear the question: “What do you want to do with all the DNA in my freezer?”

You’ve probably heard about the incredible mass of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, it’s estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The video above shows some work going on in the Pacific quantifying the constant migration of small particles of plastic towards this trash dump. Such a shame we can’t figure out a way not only to clean it up, but to recycle it - maybe make our next generation of pipet tips from this plastic?

Things are running smoothly in the Wares lab right now; 3 papers in press that are having their proofs/final edits juggled, and two proposals. That should make for a busy last few months of the year. I’m also pleased to have been invited to contribute to the more-widely-read blog “EEB & FLOW”, so watch for good stuff there as well.

One of my favorite local cartoonists (his work was shown previously in the “Zombie Semester” entry) is Joe Havasy. A bizarre blend of biology with gory illustration and pop colors is what attracts me to the paintings in my office of a squid catching and squeezing a whale on a brilliant bubbly background. Here, Joe actually makes some of our least attractive study organisms - freshwater mussels - look very cool indeed (as they are!):