UCL RESEARCH DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, EVOLUTION AND ENVIRONMENT

Congratulations to Siobhan Cox who successfully passed her PhD viva held at The Natural History Museum on Friday 5 April.  Her thesis is on Diversification and Molecular Systematics in African Zosterops (Aves: Passeriformes). This project was co-supervised with Dr Julia Day (UCL GEE) and Dr Robert Prys-Jones (NHM).

On Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, Jonathan Freedland journeys from the origin of life to the possibilities of new life-forms with the geneticist Adam Rutherford. Steve Jones updates the Bible from the point of view of modern science and Barbara Sahakian looks at our ability to make decisions, and whether 'smart drugs' should be used to boost our reactions. The artist Susan Aldworth is inspired by neuro-scientific imagery to explore the relationship between mind and body in her portraits of those with epilepsy and in doing so asks how this material corresponds or contrasts with the subject's sense of self.

The Bible was the first scientific textbook of all; and it got some things right (and plenty more wrong). Steve Jones' new book rewrites it in the light of modern science. Are we all descended from a single couple, a real-life Adam and Eve? Was the Bible's great flood really a memory of the end of the Ice Age? Will we ever get back to Methuselah given that British life expectancy is still rising by six hours a day, every day?

My colleague David Wilkie who died recently at the age of 89 was an extraordinary and endearing character. As an undergraduate at Glasgow University he played football for Queens Park, then an amateur club in the professional Scottish league, having previously represented Scotland as a schoolboy. David's studies were interrupted in 1942 when, at the age of just 19, he volunteered for service in the RAF.

You may have missed the latest genetic discovery. As reported by The Daily Telegraph on Friday: "One million British men may be directly descended from the Roman legions". The story reappeared on Sunday, at the Who Do You Think You Are – Live event at London's Olympia, when it was repeated by Alistair Moffatt, the managing director of BritainsDNA, the company behind the claims.

Such stories are becoming increasingly common in newspapers, on television and radio. Last week on the BBC miniseries Meet the Izzards we were told that Eddie Izzard is a Viking descendant on his mother's side and an Anglo-Saxon descendant on his father's. Last year the Observer reported that Tom Conti has Saracen origins and is a relative of Napoleon Bonaparte.

And for upwards of £150 you too can have your DNA "tested" by any of a number of direct-to-consumer ancestry companies. But how reliable are these claims? The truth is that there is usually little scientific substance to most of them and they are better thought of as genetic astrology.

“Thicker hair, tooth shape, more sweat glands … could have increased fitness, but for quite different reasons,” said Professor Mark Thomas (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment). Read: UCL News

The Department and Pascale's PhD supervisors, Prof Mark Thomas and Prof Dallas Swallow, warmly congratulate Pascale on the successful defense of her thesis entitled 'Modeling demographic and evolutionary history: Integrating genetic and archaeological data' at her viva exam on Friday, 8 February. 

Our warmest congratulations to Elisabeth Harley who successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled 'Reproductive quality and mating strategy in stalk-eyed flies', supervised by Professor Kevin Fowler and Professor Andrew Pomiankowski.

How does what we eat affect how we age? Is it a question of quantity, or is quality the key? With the global population getting older and many of the world's most devastating diseases linked to the process of ageing, answering these questions could be essential to a healthy future. Matt Piper, from the Institute of Healthy Ageing at UCL, talks to Benjamin Thompson about the science behind a healthy diet.

This packed lunch event was recorded live on 5 December 2012 at Wellcome Collection.

A coherent pathway which starts from no more than rocks, water and carbon dioxide and leads to the emergence of the strange bio-energetic properties of living cells, has been been traced for the first time in a major hypothesis paper in Cell this week.

Published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, Nik Maniatis and colleagues (PhD student Heather Elding,  post doc Winston Lau and Prof Dallas Swallow) have now used their gene mapping strategy for a genome wide association study.  Using this method  which more precisely maps gene locations and uses fewer samples than current meta-analyses, they have been able to identify a large number of additional genes for Crohn’s Disease, making a total of more than 200.  Notably some of these  appear to have a much stronger effect in a clinical subgroup of patients--another step towards personalised medicine. UCL's Press Release here.

Congratulations to Professor Max Telford on the success of his recent ERC Advanced Grant application.  ERC Advanced Grants allow exceptional established research leaders of any nationality and any age to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects that open new directions in their respective research fields or other domains.  The award (Euro2.1m) will be used to exploit and develop further studies in the Telford lab on Xenacoelomorpha (see the abstract).  

We congratulate our colleague, Prof Roger Wotton (Genetics, Evolution & Environment), who, along with four other colleagues has been awarded a UCL Research Frontiers prize for An imaginary interview between a New Academic and E Ray Lankester, Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at UCL from 1875-1890.

Quantitative Analysis of Fission Yeast Transcriptomes and Proteomes in Proliferating and Quiescent Cells

There is a battle playing out inside your body right now. It started billions of years ago and it is still being fought in every one of us every minute of every day. It is the story of a viral infection - the battle for the cell.

3 October 2012

Kate Jones's research on bat echolocation is part of the Zooniverse Project which is a collection of web-based Citizen Science projects that use the efforts and abilities of volunteers to help researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them. 

The IHA recently took part in the hugely successful Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition with a stand explaining current research on healthy ageing.  As a consequence of this, further invitations were received to participate in other events and the team has therefore already exhibited in Bangkok, Thailand at the invitation of The British Council and are due to take part shortly in the more local Bloomsbury Festival to be held on  20/21 October as well as a Science Exhibition in Brighton in the New Year.  Congratulations to Dr Matt Piper and his team from the Partridge, Piper, Gems and also Bahler labs for an excellent piece of public engagement.

Congratulations to Dr Ivana Bjedov of the Partridge lab in the IHA who has been awarded 1,453,219 euros as part of an ERC Starting Grant to study cancer in Drosophila. The 5 year project will be conducted at the UCL Cancer Institute.

Congratulations to Professors Linda Partridge and David Gems on their recent award of a £4.7m Wellcome Trust Strategic Award.  The project, entitled 'Biological determinants of ageing and late life health, and their pharmacological manipulation' will build on an earlier WTSA awarded in 2007.

GEE's Prof Jurg Bahler has been awarded an EMBO grant of Euros 30,000 to fund a conference which he is organizing on 'Fission Yeast: Pombe 2013:  7th International Fission Yeast Meeting' which will be held at UCL 24-29 June 2013.

20 August 2012

Professor Mark Thomas (UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment) talks about DNA, and why it could become a future option for storing large amounts of data. Watch: Channel 4 News

GEE is proud to announce the launch of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environmental Research (CBER),  a vibrant research centre bringing together UCL researchers from a range of departments across UCL including Life, Earth, Social, Computational and Mathematical Science directed by Prof Georgina Mace.

Warmest congratulations from everyone in GEE/IHA to David Gems who will officially become Professor of Biogerontology as of October 2012.  

Using analysis from Web of Science, 'Lab Times' shows GEE's Prof Linda Partridge  in top 30 of most cited authors in ageing research.

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Georgina Mace as Professor of Biodiversity & Ecosystems in GEE. Georgina will also be the first Director of the new Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research.  Georgina, who was previously Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College joined us on 1st August.  Her research interests are in measuring the trends and consequences of biodiversity loss and ecosystem change. She led the development of criteria for listing species on IUCN’s Red List of threatened species, and was a coordinating lead author for biodiversity in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (www.maweb.org). Recently she has worked on the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (uknea.unep-wcmc.org/) , is a co-investigator on the NERC Valuing Nature Network, and is an Associate Director of the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation Programme, funded by DfID, NERC and ESRC (www.espa.ac.uk). She was elected FRS in 2002, and was the 2007 winner of the international Cosmos prize. She is currently a member of NERC Council, President of the British Ecological Society and Chair of the science committee for the DIVERSITAS global change research programme.