Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Off Topic: 19 Species of Fern Named for Lady Gaga
This is both hilarious and kind of awesome at the same time, so I had to share! As a big fan myself, I love that Duke scientists also love Lady Gaga. Normally naming a plant after a person this way doesn't follow the rules of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, but technically they got around it by naming it after the gene sequence. "The name Gaga also echoes one of the molecular synapomorphies that characterizes the genus. At nucleotide positions 598–601 in the matK gene alignment, all Gaga species have “GAGA” (Fig. 6), a sequence pattern not seen at this site in any other cheilanthoid fern sampled," from the paper, for anyone interested: Gaga, a New Fern Genus Segregated from Cheilanthes (Pteridaceae)
From the article from the Duke website if you still don't believe me: 19 Species of Fern Named for Lady Gaga, "Two of the species in the Gaga genus are new to science: Gaga germanotta from Costa Rica is named to honor the family of the artist, who was born Stefani Germanotta. And a newly discovered Mexican species is being dubbed Gaga monstraparva (literally monster-little) in honor of Gaga's fans, whom she calls, 'little monsters'."
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I love this! I work with discovering bacteriophage (Virus of bacteria) and I go over a lot of DNA sequencing and often find the GAGA sequence, and always smile when I do. I'm glad they named the genus Gaga. So cool.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I wasn't sure if it was cool or not at first because I don't know how I feel about naming plants after pop stars, but in this case it works so well (while still following the rules) how could you not! The fact that the GAGA sequence was only found in this genus of fern and no others is kind of a crazy coincidence.
DeleteI'm quite speechless, but think that's really cool.
ReplyDeleteExactly, I think it's cool that the name seemed to fit real well with all the details of the fern. I do hope that this doesn't start some wacky trend in nomenclature where people start trying to bend the rules to name something after their favorite celebrity though.
Deletehahahaha, how brilliant, i so have to tell this to my school friends
ReplyDeleteIt's like the orchid genus Dracula, named cause of the lower sepals that resemble the teeth.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting her bisexual gametophyte and the GAGA sequence on the DNA. Great article!
Do not know how close you are to Sandy, but good luck and keep safe!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your concern! We are not too close to the coast, but are in the path. Mostly worried about the basement flooding from all the rain,(it did with hurricane Irene, and that wasn't as bad as this one) and having the electricity be out for the days they're predicting. We already lost power once, but temporarily have it back, so so far so good. We're pretty prepared, so will be fine as long as we don't have electricity outages for more than a few days.
DeleteThanks fot the post . it is very informative.
ReplyDeleteThanks
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