New England RNA Data Club - The Day After

Wow, yesterday was great! We had food, beer, wine and over a hundred people in attendance. There was plenty of conversation and I got a chance to talk to many people, although I wish we had more time to socialize.

Thanks to everyone who came. And thanks to our sponsors Alnylam and NEB.

Here is funny story for you. I started giving my power point presentation and everything seemed fine except that the room kept on getting hotter and hotter. It turns out that the thermostat was set to 85 degrees. So there I am in a long-sleeved shirt, drenched in sweat. By the end of my 30min talk (well closer to 40min, yes I was 10min over my allotted time) my brain was fried. But from the response, I got the impression that people were very enthusiastic about my talk.

Foretunately someone was able to reset the thermostat (I won't say how, but I'll just add that it was a beer-induced action) and the room quickly cooled down for the remainder of the talks.

Next up we had two talks on how the family of let7 miRNAs downregulate pro-proliferative genes and how the loss of this regulation leads to oncogenesis. The first of these talks was given by Christine Mayr from the Bartel Lab (go check out her recent Science paper) and the second talk was from Erwei Song a visiting scholar from Sun Yat-Sen University (Guangzhou, China) who is working in the Leiberman Lab here at Harvard Medical School.

Also when the name Boston Area RNA Club was first proposed as the name of this monthly meeting someone suggested that we use the acronym BARNACL (Boston Arear RNA Club) but since we had invited labs from NH we changed the name to New England RNA Data Club thus inadvertently altering our acronym to NERD Club ...

The next meeting is set for June 19th.