Then and Now: Mohamed Noor on Flies, Evolution, and Star Trek

When The Scientist first interviewed Mohamed Noor back in 2012, he was already an award-winning, established researcher in genetics and evolution at Duke University. His early work in Drosophila explored mechanisms of reproductive isolation in the evolution of new species and revealed how chromosomal inversions contribute to speciation by preventing gene exchange. His experiments had even challenged long-held beliefs in genetics, demonstrating that recombination hotspots do exist in the Drosophila genome. “We’re using the data on how much recombination is occurring at these fine scales and correlating that with patterns of variation in DNA sequences across whole genomes,” Noor said at the time.

Fourteen years later, in honor of The Scientist’s 40^th anniversary, Noor shared the details of his most exciting discoveries, how technological advances have affected his research, why he scaled back his lab to take on administrative and support roles at Duke, and how attending a sci-fi convention led to one of his more rewarding roles outside academia.

Solving the Lethal Allele Problem and Shutting Down the Lab

Noor has continued to work with Drosophila, and his laboratory has published several key discoveries in evolutionary genetics using this model organism. In a 2020 paper, Noor and Kieran Samuk, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab, demonstrated that the within-species recombination rate—the rate at which genetic material is exchanged between chromosomes during meiosis—is an adaptive trait in Drosophila.¹ The project relied heavily on advances in high-throughput sequencing technology. “There's no way we could have done that before; it would have been a mess,” Noor remarked.

Noor also considers one of his most recent research projects as one of his biggest achievements. He and his PhD student at the time, Sarah Marion, were exploring the mystery of lethal alleles—sites in the genome that, if homozygous, often cause the organism to die. Lethal alleles have puzzled scientists since the 1930s, Noor said, but despite extensive research, the key questions of why lethal alleles exist, what causes them, and why there are so many in wild populations of Drosophila have remained unanswered. “People kind of just stopped studying it,” he added.

In 2017, when discussing the subject with a former student, Noor had an idea. “I thought, ‘Gosh, we have so many more tools now. We can actually just solve this,’” he said. Noor started breeding flies he collected in his backyard, and 20,000 genetic crosses later, he and Marion ended up solving the puzzle using sequencing and deficiency mapping. Noor had suspected the culprits were P-elements—transposable elements otherwise known as jumping genes that cause a genetic syndrome in Drosophila called hybrid dysgenesis.² These P-elements invaded the genomes of wild Drosophila in the 1950s; old mutant stocks of Drosophila used in labs don’t have them.³

The results were surprising: None of the lethal alleles were P-elements. Instead, Noor and Marion discovered that almost all of the lethal alleles were new transposable elements that had invaded the Drosophila genome in the last 20 years.⁴ “What that means is, even though the numbers [of lethal alleles] we were seeing were similar to those studies done in the 60s and 70s, the genetic cause was different,” Noor explained. “It wouldn't have been these [new] transposable elements back then; they weren't around. It may have been P-elements back then.”

According to Noor, this suggests a model in which, over time, new transposable elements invade a species and “go crazy” jumping around the genome to create lethal alleles before they are eventually suppressed and the same thing can happen all over again. After so many decades of mystery surrounding these lethal alleles, the team was thrilled by these results. “I think that was the most exciting project I've had in my entire career,” Noor said.

Although he still teaches at Duke, Noor is less directly involved in research these days. After becoming Chair of the biology department, he was asked to step in as Dean of the natural sciences division. He enjoyed it much more than he thought he would, and he later became Executive Vice Provost of the university, which meant shutting down his lab. “[I thought] ‘I'm 55… If that’s the end, I’m okay with that,’” he said. “I had 28 years of continuously funded active research, and I'm proud of that.” Noor added that he is happy to pass the torch on to younger researchers and support them through his administrative roles. “There’s one thing I will absolutely not miss, and that's applying for research grants!” he laughed.

Live Long and Evolve: Explaining Science Through Fandoms

One of Noor’s favorite projects outside academia came about by accident after he attended his first sci-fi convention, DragonCon, in 2014. He was surprised to find several people giving talks on academic subjects. For example, one researcher gave a genetics lecture within the context of the Harry Potter fandom. The room was packed. In 2016, Noor offered to give a talk on evolution at the same convention and ended up keeping the gig for several years.

He was soon approached to write a book on evolution. He wrote Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds, which he based on simplified content from Duke’s introductory genetics and evolution course but used examples from the sci-fi show. At DragonCon 2018, Noor and his colleague, physicist Erin Macdonald, gave a joint talk focused on the science of the series Star Trek: Discovery. One of the audience members, who was also a cast member of the series and a Duke alum, got to chatting with Noor afterward and asked if he was interested in being a scientific consultant for the show. “I said, ‘I would love to, I just don't know how to even connect with the show runners,’” Noor recalled. “So, she connected me with one of the writers.”

Noor ended up consulting for the show on several occasions. In one episode, aliens were afflicted by a mysterious illness, caused by something they ingested, that was difficult to cure. When the showrunners asked him what a legitimate cause for the scenario could be, Noor suggested prion disease. In a longer story arc, characters struggled to find a way to communicate with an alien race for whom Star Trek’s universal translators didn’t work; Noor suggested they use chemical communication. “Initially, they made these very simple hydrocarbons, like methane,” Noor laughed. “[But I said] ‘No, that's a fart. You need something a lot more complex than that.’”

Now, Noor teaches a class at Duke called ‘Genetics, Evolution, Star Trek,’ and also teaches an online course on genetics and evolution through Coursera. He regularly attends the Star Trek Cruise, which attracts up to 3,000 passengers. Despite the late-night partying onboard, up to 50 people would show up to Noor’s early morning office hours to chat about science and even solve some “crazy” real-world problems. In one case, an attendee showed up with printouts of real ancestry and genotyping data, and asked Noor to help him figure out which of two possible candidates the man’s father was. “[Those two candidates] were brothers, which makes it really complicated,” Noor recalled. “But we sat there, and we worked through it, and we were able to figure it out.”

For Noor, his outreach and science communication work is not about making more scientists, but rather, he likes to encourage people to be interested in and appreciative of science. “[It’s about the fact that] science is true, and let's talk about why it's true,” he said. “And, here are some common things you may have heard about, things that are not true. We can correct those misconceptions in a safe environment because we're referencing sci-fi rather than scary stuff.”