apalazzo | June 4, 2007(via biocurious)
I don't know if you remember the news item that Reed Elsevier, publisher of many scientific journals, was funding arms trade shows. It got to the point that the editorial board of the Lancet, which is owned by Elsevier, agreed with researchers who wanted to boycott their own publication. Well it looks like Reed Elsevier has changed its policies:
Reed Elsevier announced today that it is to exit the defence exhibitions sector. This portfolio of five shows is part of Reed Elsevier's global Business division and represents around 0.5% of group annual turnover.
Sir Crispin Davis,…
apalazzo | June 4, 2007Last night we hosted another instalment of our monthly "book"club at our place. It's an excuse to meet up for a nice evening of food and drink. Note that the word "book" is in quotes because we alternate each meeting between reading a book and watching a movie. As you can tell from the photos, last night we watched a Russian movie entitled Ballad of a Soldier.
Capping a growing trend, members of the Whitehead institute outnumbered the folks from the Harvard Medical Campus for the first time in our bookclub's three year history.
Now not only are most of our club members biomedical scientists,…
apalazzo | June 3, 2007
Welcome to the 15th edition of Mendel's Garden.
This month Gregor wanted to compile a summer reading list for all those going to the beach. But watch out, a sandy keyboard is never good!
So here we go:
First off, Gregor would like to point out this very interestin peice on what exactly caused wrinkling in his peas, you remeber don't you - the wrinkled versus smooth phenotype. Well Larry Moran at Sandwalk informs us that the wrinkling phenotype was cause by a defect in a gene that encodes a starch branching enzyme. How very interesting.
For some great summer reading, Gregor suggests that you…
apalazzo | May 31, 2007Soon it will be clear that this year old manuscript by Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka will be the basis of a future Nobel Prize.
The paper is how to transform any cell into a stem cell. In the paper the authors took an "I'm so smart" approach to the whole problem. These smart guess approaches rarely work, but it's always worth trying. This paper demonstrates why.
So let's get back to the problem. Reprogramming cells so that they can become totipotent. How to proceed? From the paper:
We selected 24 genes as candidates for factors that induce pluripotency in somatic cells, based on…
apalazzo | May 30, 2007Rumour has it that last week a junior faculty here at Harvard Medical School showed up to his lab and with no prior warning announced that he was leaving academic science. The next day he was gone. All of his students were absorbed into neighboring labs. Apparently he took some lucrative position in a local biotech.
Just another day in academia ...
apalazzo | May 30, 2007This past weekend in a review of Natalie Angier's new book Steven Pinker wrote something I'd like to share with you (below the fold):
A baby sucks on a pencil and her panicky mother fears the child will get lead poisoning. A politician argues that hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as our nation's energy source. A consumer tells a reporter that she refuses to eat tomatoes that have genes in them. And a newsmagazine condemns the prospects of cloning because it could mass-produce an army of zombies.
These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy -- inane misconceptions that could have…
apalazzo | May 28, 2007Have a great entry on genetics, genes, evolution, cell biology or any other relevant topic? The 15th edition of Mendel's Garden is now requesting entries. You have until June 2nd to send 'em in. Just email me or submit them to Mendel's Garden Carnival Page. The final compilation will be posted here on June 3rd.
apalazzo | May 26, 2007Here is an amazing clip from BBC's Planet Earth demonstrating the life cycle of a member of the Cordyceps family of parasitic fungi.
For more, here is the Wikipedia entry on Cordyceps.
apalazzo | May 25, 2007In the past 15 years, the two biggest technical advances that have helped us Cell Biologists are RNAi and green fluorescent protein, aka GFP.
You see before the advent of GFP, researchers could only analyze the distribution of proteins in a living cell by first fixing and thus killing the sample. No information could be collected from a protein within it's natural envioronment, that of active cytoplasm. We could figure out where proteins were at a certain point in time, but not how they behaved over time. You see we were missing the temporal dimension. Sure there were exceptions, Yuli Wang…
apalazzo | May 24, 2007This is a cleaned up version of a comment I left on Larry Moran's blog.
As a cell biologist, I view genes as tools that contribute to the building and maintenance of different cell types. Vertebrates all have the same types of cells and thus it is no surprise that most of our genes have counterparts in all other vertebrates and all vertebrates have similar gene counts. Invertebrates such as worms and flies have almost the same number of cell types that vertebrates have and thus it is no surprise that invertebrates have almost (if not the same) number of genes that we have.
If one were to…
apalazzo | May 23, 2007After picking colonies, preparing DNA samples from them, digesting a small aliquot of the plasmid prep with the appropriate restriction enzymes and preparing an agarose gel ... you end up loading your minipreps instead of your restriction digests.
Damn.
apalazzo | May 23, 2007Stanley Miller, of the famed Urey-Miller experiment, died Sunday (NYTimes Obit).
Here's an entry from over a year ago that was catalyzed by a conversation with a former member of the Miller lab:
Last night, my wife and I had dinner with a friend of ours from the Szostak Lab (yes at Buddha's Delight - I had the "beef" taro stirfry).
There we discussed Capote (we just saw the movie) and the existence of ribose in a pre-biotic earth. Apparently it is unlikely that sugars, such as ribose, would have been in high concentrations in the hypothetical chemistry of primitive earth (see her PNAS…
apalazzo | May 22, 2007This idea that most of your DNA is continuously transcribed has been floating around scientific circles.
I've blogged about it at least twice, and Coffee Mug at GeneExpression has mentioned it.
Keeping this in mind, here is some more interesting data from Danesh's lab.
Background: Certain small siRNA produced from the genes within the centromeric portion of S. pombe's chromosome will inactivate neighboring genes found in these regions. These siRNAs accomplish this task by binding to the RITS complex. In the new paper, Marc Buhler describes exactly how the RITS complex silences nearby genes…
apalazzo | May 22, 2007Overheard in the hallway:
First postdoc: I have basically wasted a year.
Second postdoc (muttering to himself): I wasted a decade.
apalazzo | May 22, 2007CCP asks
What is the phylogenetic distribution of centrioles? Does it match that of cilia / flagella?
Just to summarize what all these cellular structures are, centrioles are distinct structures found in most eukaryotic cells. They are composed of nine microtubule triplets and two of these centrioles come together to form a centrosome, a structure which often sits at the microtubule organizing center (MTOC). Microtubules radiate out of the MTOC to form an aster (see images in this post). Remarkably, in most tissue culture cells, the MTOC sits near the cell centroid where as the nucleus lies…
apalazzo | May 21, 2007
A few days ago I wrote about Ron Breaker and Riboswitches, and today I was alerted to this really neat advanced online publication by the Breaker group on how a riboswitch in Neurospera regulates alternative splicing. Wow.
So what is happening?
When the fungi Neurospora crassa is exposed to thiamine, it takes up this vitamin B1 precursor and phosphorylates it to form thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP). This small metabolite then binds to an RNA element found within an intron in the NMT1 pre-mRNA. These RNA folds that bind to small molecules are called aptamers and when these aptamers regulate how…
apalazzo | May 21, 2007From a new Science paper:
Centrioles duplicate once in each cell division cycle through so-called templated or canonical duplication. SAK, also called PLK4 (SAK/PLK4), a kinase implicated in tumor development, is an upstream regulator of canonical biogenesis necessary for centriole formation. We found that overexpression of SAK/PLK4 could induce amplification of centrioles in Drosophila embryos and their de novo formation in unfertilized eggs. Both processes required the activity of DSAS-6 and DSAS-4, two molecules required for canonical duplication. Thus, centriole biogenesis is a template-…
apalazzo | May 20, 2007It has been a while. Here goes:
'Do you want to catch up on your Darwin?
Here's a link to the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.
Want something to listen to while you are stuck in traffic? How about the audio version of The Origin of Species.
Also there is a great podcast from the Whitehead - I've been wanting to write about this for a while - go check it out.
And there is the Science Saturdays at Bloggerheads.tv that I've mentioned previously.
What else is there ...
Via Hsien at Eye on DNA I stumbled onto this clip produced by Genome British Columbia's Learning Centre:
... uhm ... I…
apalazzo | May 19, 2007Well it looks like I'll be helping out Paul and Rich with Mendel's Garden.
I'll also be hosting the next Mendel's Garden at The Daily Transcript on June 3rd. To submit an entry email me or click here.
The July edition (#16) will be hosted by Hsien at her new home, Eye on DNA. If anyone wants to volunteer beyond July please email us.
Also here are some new tags for you to stick on to your blog. First copy & paste the code onto your blog template then erase the three asterisks (i.e. the "*").
Code:
<*a title="Mendel's Garden" href="http://mendels-garden.blogspot.com/"><*img height…