Welcome to the inaugural post on my new Nature Network blog, Pyrenaemata. My intent, which may or may not become reality, is to use this blog primarily for more technical posts. In this regard, it will complement my personal blog, Genomicron, which has been online since April 2007, and my recently launched column, DNA and Diversity, on the Scientific Blogging site. The readership of the latter is generally composed of non-scientists, and so the posts in that case tend to be more general in nature. In short, I use three blogs to do what could probably be done with one, though the partitioning is not exactly haphazard.
Why Pyrenaemata? This is an obscure term that has not been used for over 125 years. It was put forward as a category of vertebrates by George Gulliver in 1875, specifically in reference to those groups whose red blood cells contain nuclei (i.e., more or less everything except mammals). Given how badly paraphyletic this would have been, it was not widely accepted. It does, however, touch on my area of research in that Gulliver based this on an extensive study of nucleus and cell sizes in vertebrates, and one of my research topics is the association between genome size, nucleus size, and cell size, and the consequences for organismal biology of these correlations.
By way of example, I present a figure from Gulliver’s 1875 paper on blood cells in vertebrates, in which the term Pyrenaemata can be found. This reflected the culmination of 25 years’ worth of work on the topic, and remains a useful source of data on cell size. It also shows that a link between nucleus size and cell size was evident even before anyone knew what was inside nuclei (Miescher’s discovery of “nuclein” was reported in 1871, but Gulliver did most of his measurements before this).
Here is the figure:
I’d like to extend my thanks to the Nature Network for inviting me to start a blog here, and I welcome you all to it.
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