Interested in what scientists trained in evolutionary biology think of the Melba Ketchum DNA paper? You’ll want to watch 25 minutes of this Google Hangout of biologists called Breaking Bio. The guest is David Winter, a PhD in evolutionary biology currently in New Zealand, who looked a bit closer at the sequences provided in the study. Here is what he and the others think. If you don’t have time to watch it, I’ll summarize (and will notify David that this is online in case he wishes to correct anything I get wrong). Just an observation, David did a fine job of explanation. If you know a little biology, you should be able to follow his descriptions, no problem. David mentioned that he did this analysis as an obvious first step that any geneticist would do in an analysis. It’s basic. First he noted that the sequences were distributed via a PDF file. Unconventional, to say the least. Also, it’s clear that this whole genome sequencing project was expensive work. He says the first thing you do is “BLAST” the sequences [1]. You may have heard Melba Ketchum mention “blasting” in some of her interviews. That means to take sequences and compare them [...]
↧