I'm Writing A Scarlet Shiner Brain Article, And Kris Has Increasingly Cool DNA Data

Well, I'm not really writing that article but rather I've started to boil down Enrique's thesis on scarlet shiner brain size as it relates to sexual dimorphism. He seems to have gone missing, so I'm seizing the moment and doing it myself. We're going to submit it to the journal Neuroreport (I'm pretty sure) and they don't like long Introductions on articles. The starting point for the Introduction was 29 pages; I'm aiming for three pages once I do another round of cutting tomorrow from where I have it at five pages.

Kris came by and showed me some refinements on his analysis of the mummichog DNA data. All of the DNA differences he's pinpointed between the various populations are single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and they're all apparently neutral -- they don't change the amino acid sequence. Most are third position SNPs, but a surprising number are neutral first position changes. We don't have a firm transversion/transition count yet. He's working on a map to show the different collecting sites, and to try to construct a cladogram or dendrogram that would match the map. We just have to be clear in our mind where Wiscassett, Maine, is since that's a sequence we download from the NCBI data bank. As I remember it's on the central Maine coast...