Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Interesting videos about selfish genetic elements on YouTube

Enthusiastic master students of Tom van Dooren and Ken Kraaijeveld at the Institute of Biology in Leiden, the Netherlands produced interesting ideo materials on selfish genetic elements, which they made available on YouTube. The 14 videos feature such selfish genetic elements as B-chromosomes, transposable element, selfish sex chromosomes and meiotic drive (although I didn't see this one). The videos are all below 10 minutes in length, and make a good effort in introducing these elements. Since selfish genetic elements have been proposed to drive genes that make mosquitoes (e.g. Aedes aegypti) refractory to pathogens (e.g. dengue), these videos could be of interest to researchers working on vector-borne diseases. There is also a movie included more generally on Mendelian inheritance and selfish genetic elements, as well as on how to turn Powerpoint presentations into such movies. I think this a very nice project. My only criticism is that the graphical resolution of some of the movies is inadequate (see e.g. the movie on how to make movies from presentations), which is possibly due to the difficulty in capturing high-resolution movies with limited infrastructure.




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