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Probably the most
appealing part for me was

answering these long-standing questions
that I've had since I was a kid.

Evolutionary biology helps us
understand the nature around us.

First and foremost,
I'm interested in evolutionary questions.

I'm very interested in the biodiversity
that we see on Earth.

Everything from species identification
to deep, evolutionary questions

can be addressed with DNA,

and the CCG provides
all of the resources necessary.

So if someone's out collecting birds
or reptiles or whatever,

they bring it to the lab 
and extract the DNA.

They purify the DNA,
separate all the cell material from it,

and then you have pure DNA.

Once you have pure DNA,
you can do all kinds of things with it.

You can sequence that gene
for many different organisms,

then compare them to each other
and build an evolutionary history,

or a "family tree" for genes and species.

For the past 30 years,

the main platform for sequencing,
is Sanger sequencing.

With that method we look
at one section of the genome at a time.

With next-gen sequencing methods,

the data we can get
is massively increased

because we can do a lot of
the sequencing in parallel.

We have the MiSeq
sequencing machine here,

and we can produce
25 million sequences in one read.

More recently there is
a third generation sequencing.

Here we have
an Oxford Nanopore MinION machine.

So, by reading those electrical signals,
we're able to read the DNA.

It fits in my pocket. It's amazing.

(laughs)

Matt Van Dam is currently
working on weevils,

using this new technology to try
to understand their evolutionary history.

Weevils are
a particular family of beetles.

One of the problems,
in the genome assembly,

is that you have
all these little bits of information.

And then, sometimes,

sticking them together
in the right way is extremely complicated.

The Nanopore does quite well
for these longer reads.

A group of us here, at the Academy,
are sequencing

the complete genome
of the Pygmy Angelfish.

And that includes all of the chromosomes,
all of the mitochondria, and everything.

It's very exciting work.

Lauren is trying to look at
which genes are active or turned on,

and what kind of combinations
can be produced by these different genes

being turned on and off.

One of the craziest things is

we've only characterized
like 1% of scorpion venoms.

A single individual scorpion might have

150 unique types of venom
in its venom gland.

And so it has genes to create
all of these different venoms,

and those venoms are highly specific.

There's active research
on using scorpion venom

to treat cancer, to treat arthritis,
to treat multiple sclerosis.

So she is using something
called RNA-Seq or transcriptomics,

and what you do is
you sequence all of the proteins.

That's a way to sort of
skip the whole genome sequencing

and you can focus just on the RNA,
which is what produces the proteins.

I've been involved with
the seahorse project, for many years.

We've been trying to understand
this very complex group.

They apparently evolved very rapidly
and created many different forms,

so we have seahorses,
pipefish, sea dragons,

all these wild looking fish,
and nobody really knows the relationships

because they evolved
and radiated very rapidly

and in a very short period of time.

We're using a new technology
called ultra-conserved elements,

and these are parts of
the genome that are unchanged

across hundreds of millions of years
to reconstruct those branches.

Our exhibits have lots of amphibians,

so when we bring them in,
we have to make sure

that we don't spread chytrid fungus
to the rest of the others.

If we put it in
with the rest of the exhibits,

they would probably all die.

We essentially create these probes,
which are pieces of DNA

that match those unique markers
to the chytrid fungus.

If the probe matches,
we know it has this fungus.

If there's no match, we can pretty be sure
that there are no fungus infections.

I think that the role of the CCG

is to help every scientist
answer their questions.

And there are very few questions
you can address without genetic data.

We have all of this information,
that's accumulated for decades

by scientists and naturalists,

and they're depositing it
in our collection

with very good ecological data
that's associated with it.

It's very important
that we can also unlock that knowledge.

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