Long wait is finally over ,The draft of the complete genome of the soya bean (Glycine max) has been released by the Joint Genome Institute and its associates at the International Conference on Legume Genomics and Genetics in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Soya bean is pretty popular as crop plant for humans and animal food crop, which is rich in oil and protein.Another important property which makes Soya immensely useful is the its use as a feedstock for bio diesel — in which vegetable oil is chemically modified to power diesel …

Yesterday we talked about a special issue of “Evolution: Education and Outreach” dealing with the evolution of complex organ “EYE”.
Eyes are considered to be one of evolutions most important and prevalent invention.Its a common notion that all animals have eyes ,which is not the case as one third of animals infact do without the need of complex eye.Larger animals posses eyes and they come in all forms,size and shapes ,resulting in different kinds of vision ,but serving the same purpose -to give these animals a critical edge in interspecies warfare, …

A special issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach, dealing with the evolution of eyes is available free online.The journal Evolution: Education and Outreach completes one year now and decided to come out with a special issue on eye evolution to celebrate a milestone completing Volume 1 in their first year of publication!The special issue is edited by T. Ryan Gregory, who also wrote the Introduction to the issue.
The eye is a complex organ that detects light from the surroundings and enable vision in metazoans. Although eyes have always been a …

The main aim of this postdoctoral positon is to study the molecular mechanisms responsible for transcriptional activation of the Drosophila embryo after egg fertilization. More specifically this work will involve the characterization of a previously isolated collection of mutants (Pimenta-Marques et al., 2008), identification and characterization of the mutants specifically defective for transcriptional activation, and functional characterization of the relevant gene(s). The goal is to better understand how is transcription initiated de novo in a spatially and temporally controlled manner after egg fertilization.

The eye is considered to have developed at rather quick pace during the ‘Cambrian explosion’, 540 million years ago.Charles Drawin always wondered how natural selection could have led to the development of an organ as complex as the eye and with a common origin, in so many different kinds of animals. A group of Scientists led by Detlev Arendt, in EMBL,Germany have found how the primitive sea creature, zooplankton, respond to light that marks an early stage in the development of the eye. Larvae of marine invertebrates – worms, …

The research training program Graduiertenkolleg 1104 (From Cells to Organs: Molecular Mechanisms of Organogenesis) is a DFG-funded research program joining developmental biologists in the Faculty of Biology, the Faculty of Medicine,and the Max-Planck- Institute of Immunobiology in Freiburg with the aim to create an innovative training program for graduate students.