Sequencing The Tuatuara Genome

Your questions – epigenetics

David Winter • Oct 02, 2013

It’s time for us to answer another of your questions about tuatara, evolution and the science of genomics. This time, a question from Sciblog’s on Darcy Cowan “What about epigenetic markers? How important are these when considering if all the genomic information has been captured?” We had better start answering Darcy’s question by saying what epigenetics is. What, if … Read More

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What we already know – a tuatara transcriptome

David Winter • Aug 14, 2013

We are not starting from scratch in our mission to understand the genetics of tuatara. Scientists have been working on these creatures for more than a hundred years, and in that time plenty of researchers have used tuatara DNA to try to understand the world. For the most part, these studies have used DNA sequences as witnesses to evolutionary history, rather … Read More

Your questions – How many species?

David Winter • Jul 19, 2013

Here’s the first in our series answering your questions about the project. We start with a question from Maggy Wassilieff, who wants to know about the tuatara population living on North Brother Island in the Cook Strait: Could you comment on the current understanding of the Brothers Is Tuatara? Is it a separate species? How long has the Brothers Is … Read More

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Interview with Graeme Hill

David Winter • Jul 18, 2013

Neil’s take-over of the New Zealand media scene continues apace. This weekend Neil and Graeme Hill from Radio Live had a chat about the project , Allan Wilson’s impact on evolutionary biology and where the tuatara fits into the New Zealand fauna. Read More

Tuatara genome project in the news

David Winter • Jul 05, 2013

Neil was on Radio New Zealand National this morning, discussing the tuatara genome with Kathryn Ryan That’s not the first bit of media interest in the project, so here, for those of you who just can’t get enough tuatara news in your life, is a list of stories on the project from other sites: Radio Kim Hill had Neil … Read More

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Any questions?

David Winter • Jul 03, 2013

This blog is very much for you, the reader. We’ve been really pleased with the reaction to our opening few posts, and especially happy that readers have asked us questions about the project. I’ve forwarded those questions on to the people that can best answer them, and hope to dedicate a post to those answers next week. There is … Read More

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An update from the boss

David Winter • Jul 01, 2013

It’s about time this blog moved from the abstract to the concrete. Now you know why we are sequencing the tuatara genome, and have an idea about how we’ll go about doing it, it’s time to meet the boss and hear how the project is going so far. Neil Gemmell is the leader of the tuatara genome … Read More

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First find your tuatara (or how to sequence a genome)

David Winter • Jun 25, 2013

So, now we’ve told you why we’re so keen on sequencing the tuatara genome you might want to know exactly how we are going to do it. As the project goes on we will get the experts working on each stage to describe exactly what they’re up to, and how it’s going. But we also want to give you … Read More

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Why sequence the tuatara genome?

David Winter • Jun 17, 2013

  Sequencing and making sense of the tuatara genome is going to be a big project.  It will take the skill and dedication of many scientists, help from our partner organisations and probably several hundred thousand dollars on top of that. We can only put so much time and effort into this project because we know a tuatara genome sequence … Read More

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Stand by

David Winter • Jun 14, 2013

You’re too quick! We are going to use this blog to tell you all about the sequencing of the tuatara genome, but we still have a few ‘i’s to dot ‘t’s to cross before we launch. Come back on Monday June 17th when you can learn why we are so excited about being able to sequence these amazing animals. Read More