WEBVTT

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Probably the most
appealing part for me was

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

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Evolutionary biology helps us
understand the nature around us.

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

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

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Everything from species identification
to deep, evolutionary questions

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can be addressed with DNA,

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and the CCG provides
all of the resources necessary.

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

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they bring it to the lab 
and extract the DNA.

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

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and then you have pure DNA.

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

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You can sequence that gene
for many different organisms,

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

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or a "family tree" for genes and species.

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For the past 30 years,

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the main platform for sequencing,
is Sanger sequencing.

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

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With next-gen sequencing methods,

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the data we can get
is massively increased

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

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We have the MiSeq
sequencing machine here,

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and we can produce
25 million sequences in one read.

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More recently there is
a third generation sequencing.

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Here we have
an Oxford Nanopore MinION machine.

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

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It fits in my pocket. It's amazing.

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(laughs)

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Matt Van Dam is currently
working on weevils,

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

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Weevils are
a particular family of beetles.

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One of the problems,
in the genome assembly,

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is that you have
all these little bits of information.

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And then, sometimes,

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sticking them together
in the right way is extremely complicated.

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The Nanopore does quite well
for these longer reads.

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

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the complete genome
of the Pygmy Angelfish.

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

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It's very exciting work.

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

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

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being turned on and off.

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One of the craziest things is

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

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A single individual scorpion might have

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150 unique types of venom
in its venom gland.

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

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and those venoms are highly specific.

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There's active research
on using scorpion venom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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They apparently evolved very rapidly
and created many different forms,

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so we have seahorses,
pipefish, sea dragons,

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

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because they evolved
and radiated very rapidly

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and in a very short period of time.

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

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and these are parts of
the genome that are unchanged

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across hundreds of millions of years
to reconstruct those branches.

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Our exhibits have lots of amphibians,

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

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

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

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they would probably all die.

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We essentially create these probes,
which are pieces of DNA

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that match those unique markers
to the chytrid fungus.

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

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

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I think that the role of the CCG

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is to help every scientist
answer their questions.

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

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

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by scientists and naturalists,

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and they're depositing it
in our collection

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

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

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