Suegene Noh, an assistant professor of biology at Colby College, gave a lecture titled, \u201cHow Current Genomes are Shaped by Evolutionary Pasts\u201d where she looked at how lives of organisms are shaped by their social interactions. Dr. Noh\u2019s talk was definitely my favorite of the series so far- most likely because of my more scientific background. I think she did an incredible job linking the more specific scientific talk with the humanities. Additionally, her topic resonated the most regarding the presence of the past for me. Dr. Noh is an evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on how social interactions among microbial organisms shape their genomes. Additionally, these interactions affect how our genomes evolve so that current patterns of DNA sequence variation can be used to detect past evolutionary events. Dr. Noh took some time to explain how a social amoeba works and its microbial symbiont. As a specific example, she used how competitive interactions among amoebas has caused certain genes to evolve more rapidly, and how associating with an amoeba host may have caused symbiont genomes to shrink in size. Essentially, all of this is amoebas developing into multicellular organisms. The Dictystelium Discoideum \u201cDicty\u201d social amoebae aggregate together, form little mounds, and the mounds elongate into slugs, which are multicellular organisms.<\/p>\n
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Dr. Noh explained that conflict would affect how social conflict would affect how the aggregates form together as one. They compete against each other for varying spots in the body, or else the formation would always be predictable. When genetically different cells are in the same body, their interests tend to be different. In this case, social conflict means environmental changes like climate change and food sources changes. Those same changes affect humans who group into types of societies based on the specific changes around them.<\/p>\n
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When thinking about conflict and the presence of the past it reminded me of how groups are created through conflict and shaped by their social interactions. In the past, the creation of specific groups that come to mind are ones like democrats and republicans, the union and the confederates, even something as simple as where people live. Humans love conflict and in turn, groups are formed when conflict is found and a substantial amount of groups formed centuries ago, still exist today. All of these formations of communities depend on the social conflicts that are going on around the people.<\/p>\n
One audience member asked a question regarding the interaction between which amobas become which parts of the aggregated slug. Dr. Noh replied by saying yes, her research tries to show that the genes that are activated determine how they respond and aggregate. Additionally, the center of aggregation has a significant affect. Another question asked by an audience member concerned why Dr. Noh wanted Dicty from the wild versus from the lab. She explained that there are 3 strains of Dicty and strains can be adapted to lab conditions so its hard to imagine how cells are aggregating when they are from the inside of a flask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Suegene Noh, an assistant professor of biology at Colby College, gave a lecture titled, \u201cHow Current Genomes are Shaped by Evolutionary Pasts\u201d where she looked at how lives of organisms are shaped by their social interactions. Dr. Noh\u2019s talk was definitely my favorite of the series so far- most likely because of my more scientific … <\/p>\n