Two recent papers published online at scienceexpress.org describe studies of antibodies claimed to interfere with infection of host cells by a wide range of HIV-1 strains. These studies strongly suggest that the evolutionary potential of the humoral immune response...
In previous posts, I discussed, respectively, the use of selection to generate an antibody of potential value in treating influenza A virus infections (1) and the relevance of protein dynamics to the evolution of protein function (2). A recent paper in...
I recently completed reading one of the most stimulating books (1) on the conceptual aspects of evolution that I have read in many years. The author, Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of biology at Harvard. He has written widely on topics in the...
A couple of months ago, my institution hosted a one-day symposium on phylogenetics. One of the speakers was John Avise, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the individual generally credited with originating the field of phylogeography. His talk and those...
Investigation of model organisms can sometimes be misleading about the biology of humans, but this is often because expectations about similarities between different species, especially when studied in substantially different contexts, are unrealistic (Casanova and...
