Rey Queso and the Cheese Kings (Todd) got 15.98 points from Andrew Luck and 15.90 from Dez Bryant to take down The Queens (Nicole), 93.18 - 89.30 in the First Championship of the Oakley Lab Fantasy Football challenge.
FORT LAUDERDALE-DAVIE, Fla. – Pop Quiz: what creatures make up more than 70% of the approximately 1.9 million described species on earth and have long served as model organisms in many areas of biology? If you guessed invertebrates, you’re right!
Elizabeth Pennisi has written an article about the SICB symposium organized by Todd Oakley and former lab member Jeanne Serb, now a professor at Iowa State University. The article highlights recent findings from our lab and other labs, showing that several animals showing that opsins are used not only in eyes, but in other contexts as well. Our lab is working on extraocular photoreceptors in Cnidaria, Cephalopoda, and Polyplacophora.
What good is half an eye? Evolutionary biologists studying the origins of vision get that question a lot, and new research out of UC Santa Barbara points to a possible answer. Findings appearing today in the journal BMC Biology indicate that, even in the absence of eyes altogether, some creatures display a light-sensitivity that uses the same visual pathway that allows humans to see.
The water flea –– Daphnia pulex –– has the largest inventory of genes ever recorded for a sequenced animal, according to a new study in the journal Science by 69 co-authors. An international team effort to sequence the genome of the water flea included work by UC Santa Barbara biologists.
Daphnia is the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced. The study found that it contains more than 31,000 genes. By comparison, humans have only about 23,000 genes.
This week's publication of the complete genomic sequence of a living marine sponge reveals genes dating back hundreds of millions of years –– a result far exceeding the expectations of the scientific world.
