Friday, December 2, 2011

Dec. 6, 2011 journal club

  • When: Tuesday, Dec.6, 12:15 PM
  • Where: Room E6519, BSPH
Big thanks to Kate Laws of the Drummond-Barbosa lab for volunteering (quite spontaneously) to present for this journal club meeting!! She'll be presenting:

String (Cdc25) regulates stem cell maintenance, proliferation and aging in Drosophila testis
Inaba, Yuan, and Yamashita [lab link]
Development, 138: 5079-5086

Kate's comments about this paper: "Previous papers from the Yamashita lab have addressed centrosome orientation and cell adhesion in the asymmetric division of Drosophila male GSCs, which is definitely interesting (and came up quite a bit during Xin Chen's lecture here last month). While this paper finds no role for String in spindle orientation of GSC or the somatic stem cells in the testis niche, it does deal with another question that's close to both my heart and the hearts of those in my lab: do stem cells regulate their cell cycle differently than their progeny? Additionally, Yukiko was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant earlier this year!"

And as a warm-up for journal club, be sure to go support Kate in her alter ego role, Commander Kate of the JHSPH Happy Hour!

Saturday, November 19, 2011

November 22, 2011 journal club

  • When: Tuesday, Nov. 22, 12:15 PM
  • Where: Room E6519, BSPH
Phylis Hetie of the Matunis lab will be presenting:

Wolbachia enhance Drosophila stem cell proliferation and target the germline stem cell niche
Science (2011, hot off the presses) 334:990

Frydman lab website (note the pedigree!)

Some interesting nuggets on Wolbachia:
Ars Technica piece
NSF-funded Wolbachia info site

Abstract: Wolbachia are widespread maternally transmitted intracellular bacteria that infect most insect species and are able to alter the reproduction of innumerous hosts. The cellular bases of these alterations remain largely unknown. Here, we report that Drosophila mauritiana infected with a native Wolbachia wMau strain produces about four times more eggs than the noninfected counterpart. Wolbachia infection leads to an increase in the mitotic activity of germline stem cells (GSCs), as well as a decrease in programmed cell death in the germarium. Our results suggest that up-regulation of GSC division is mediated by a tropism of Wolbachia for the GSC niche, the cellular microenvironment that supports GSCs.

Friday, November 4, 2011

November 8, 2011 journal club

  • When: Tuesday, Nov. 8, 12:15 PM
  • Where: Room E6519, BSPH

Lauren Matthews of the Evans lab will be presenting two related papers:

Postfertilization autophagy of Sperm Organelles Prevents Paternal Mitochondrial DNA Transmission
Rawi et al., Science, published online October 27

Degradation of Paternal Mitochondria by Fertilization-triggered autophagy in C. elegans embryos
Sato and Sato, Science, published online October 27

Her comments:
"These papers caught my eye because they address an interesting reproductive biology question: are paternal mitochondria selectively eliminated after fertilization and if so, how does this occur? The authors demonstrate that paternal mitochondria are selectively eliminated from the early C. elegans embryo by autophagy in order to ensure maternal inheritance of mtDNA. A 2008 paper in Science showed that autophagy is upregulated after fertilization and is essential for early development of mouse embryos. It will be interesting to see if this mechanism for selective elimination of paternal mitochondria is conserved in mammals."

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

October 25, 2011 journal club

Our next reproductive biology journal club will be Tuesday, Oct. 25, at 12:15 PM in Room E6519.

Matt Beattie of the Zirkin lab will present -- and he's picked a paper I'm quite keen on:

Paternally-induced transgenerational environmental reprogramming of metabolic gene expression in mammals
Carone et al.
Cell 143: 1084-1096.
Oliver Rando information - department website, EUREKA announcement

Everyone knows how important maternal care and diet are, in the pre-natal period and even pre-conception (example 1; example 2) ... but what about Dad? This journal club paper is one of two papers that came out in the last year that identify some effects of paternal diet on offspring. (FYI, the other is this, by Margaret Morris' group at the University of South Wales.) These papers don't answer all the questions, and in fact, they raise more questions than they answer (IMHO) -- but oh, the interesting questions they raise!

And a bit of shameless promotion -- both Ollie Rando and Margaret Morris are on the program of the upcoming 2012 annual meeting of the American Society of Andrology. (Yall come! abstract deadline is November 1, 2011.)

Sunday, October 9, 2011

October 11, 2011 journal club

We're meeting Tuesday, October 11, 12:15 in Room E6519.

Rachel from the Matunis lab will be presenting ... and she's picking something "off the beaten path," but very cool. And actually, it's broader than we might think at first glance:

Royalactin induces queen differentiation in honeybees
Nature 473:478-483

Masaki Kamakura

Related links (thanks for sharing these, Rachel!):
News and Views
Nature News blog

I hope she'll forgive me for quoting her (as I think her comments are very good! -- and I took liberties to highlight some key points):
"As many of the papers nearest and dearest to my heart (and interesting to a broad, reproductive biology audience) have been done in JCs past, I decided to pick a paper that was just really cool. It focuses on the mechanism of how queen bees become queens. Larvae destined for queenhood ingest a substance called royal jelly, which among other things, causes females to have enlarged ovaries and hyper-fertility. The author (yes, singular) isolates the active protein in royal jelly and figures out the pathway through which it mediates it activity. Then, he shows that the protein causes similar effects when he expresses it Drosophila. I think the methods used in this paper are very insightful, and I think we will have a lot of fun doing it."

I agree that there are some very interesting aspects of reproductive biology and function coming from what we might consider unexpected places. Rachel has picked one here that looks like it has some interesting insights into ovarian/gonad physiology. [BTW, another example that I liked over the last year is another cool story from social insects about sperm competition -- an evolutionarily conserved process too (for example ...). It never hurts to read something a little unusual!]

Thursday, September 22, 2011

September 27, 2011 journal club

And we're off to the races for AY 2011-2012!
We'll meet Tuesday, Sept. 27, 12:15 in Room E6519.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Ables of the Drummond-Barbosa lab for kicking us off.
She'll be presenting:


Loss of lysine specific demethylase 1 nonautonomously causes stem cell tumors in the Drosophila ovary
S. Eliazer, N.A. Shalaby, and M. Buszczak
PNAS 2011, 108:7032

She says,
"I chose this paper because it describes an intriguing role for epigenetic modifiers, specifically the conserved histone demethylase Lsd1, functions (1) during development to regulate the size of the Drosophila germline stem cell (GSC) niche, and (2) in adult somatic tissue adjacent to the GSCs to limit the production of niche-specific signals that maintain GSCs. Cell autonomous epigenetic control of GSCs has been demonstrated by several labs (including the [Erika] Matunis lab), but to my knowledge, this is the the first report demonstrating that epigenetic modifications also control somatic niche cell development and function."

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

MRD/UPenn Conference on Reproduction and Regeneration, June 13-14, 2011

There is a nearby (and FREE!) conference coming up that I thought many of you would be interested in:
The 2011 Annual MRD conference on Reproduction and Regeneration
June 13-14, in Philadelphia, PA,
sponsored by the journal Molecular Reproduction and Development (and publisher Wiley-Blackwell).

Gary Wessel, editor-in-chief of MRD, describes the conference:
"This year's version, v3.0, will be at UPenn in collaboration with the Center for Research in Reproduction and Women's Health, and the Institute for Regenerative Medicine. This year's edition is value-added by partnering with the groups at UPenn. Registration is Free - Poster session with awards - lots of food - ~25 speakers - workshop on bioinformatics. Should be lots of fun."

The conference and workshop will be held on the University of Pennsylvania campus in the Auditorium of the new Translational Research Center (TRC) building, adjacent to the the new Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine.

If you have questions, I'm sure that Gary would be happy to help out (his email address: rhet@brown.edu).

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Thesis defense of Erin Stanley

Erin Stanley of the Zirkin lab will be presenting her dissertation defense seminar:

"Leydig cell stem/progenitor cells in neonatal, adult and aged testes"

Tuesday, May 31, 2011
10 AM
Room 1020 (Becton-Dickinson Hall), School of Public Health

Congratulations, Erin, and good luck!

May 17, 2011 journal club

When and where: Tuesday, May 17, 12:15 PM, Room E6519

Dolly of the Wright lab will be presenting:

Sin3a
Is Required by Sertoli Cells to Establish a Niche for Undifferentiated Spermatogonia, Germ Cell Tumors, and Spermatid Elongation

Stem Cells (2010), 28:1424-1434
Payne, Gallagher, Foreman, Dannenberg, Depinho, and Braun

Dolly says, "I choose this paper because of its focus on Sertoli cells, an area that I am not too familiar with but most interested in further exploring.* The authors were interested in studying how the regulation of Sertoli cell chromatin is affected during fetal and juvenile periods of testis development and how it influences the establishment of the germ stem cell niche -- especially since Sertoli cells are sensitive to epigenetic alternation and play a role in the maintenance and formation of undifferentiated spermatogonia."

* Blog keeper's comment: Hey, good for you, Dolly!

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

April 26, 2011 journal club

When and where: Room E6519, Tuesday, April 26, 12:15 PM

Andrew Wolfe will be presenting -- and I'm really excited about the paper he picked:

Endocrine regulation of male fertility by the skeleton
Cell 144:796-809
Oury et al.
Gerard Karsenty website at Columbia
Commentary on this paper

... as this paper is one that caught my eye, and I posted it with suggestions for a "DIY" journal club to replace the March 22 one. It's also a paper that some outside the reproductive biology community are noticing and have asked me about -- so it catching some attention. We'll discuss to determine if it's truth or fiction, or somewhere in between!

Thursday, April 7, 2011

April 12, 2011 journal club

When and where: Room W2303, Tuesday, April 12, 12:15 PM

Shiying Jin of the Zirkin lab will present:

Protein tyrosine kinase WEE1B is essential for metaphase II exit in mouse oocytes
Oh JS, Susor A, and Conti M [Marco Conti's UCSF webpage]
Science 2011, ePub ahead of print (DOI: 10.1126/science.1199211)

This paper presents the interesting finding that (as the abstract states), "... exit from metaphase requires not only a proteolytic degradation of cyclin B, but also the inhibitory phosphorylation of Cdc2 by Wee1B," as well as reveals an additional role for Calcium/Calmodulin-dependent kinase II (CaMKII) in the egg-to-embryo transition. This work also extends what we know about WEE1B functions in oocytes, complementing previous work of the Conti lab on the role of WEE1B in prophase I arrest (Curr Biol, 15:1670).

Thursday, March 17, 2011

No RBJC on March 22

Alas, we will be canceling the previously scheduled March 22 RBJC meeting.
But chin up! Do your own personal journal club!
There are a number of cool papers out there ... perhaps some inspiration for a paper pick for a future RBJC lies in this list of a few things that have been on my reading list:

Endocrine regulation of male fertility by the skeleton
Cell 144:796-809
Commentary

Insulin/FOXO signaling regulates ovarian prostaglandins critical for reproduction

Dev Cell 19:858

Most mouse spermatozoa begin their acrosome reaction before contact with the zona pellucida during in vitro fertilization
PNAS in press
Commentary 1
Commentary 2 [requires JHED sign-in]

MITOPLD is a mitochondrial protein essential for nuage formation and piRNA biogenesis in the mouse germline
Dev Cell 20:364-375
piRNA-associated germline nuage formation and spermatogenesis require MitoPLD profusogenic mitochondrial-surface lipid signaling
Dev Cell 20:376-387
Commentary

See you for our next meeting, April 12!
(We are skipping a week because a bunch of us will be away for the North American Testis Workshop and/or American Society of Andrology meeting)

Thursday, March 3, 2011

March 8, 2011 journal club

When and where: Room W2303, 12:15, Tuesday March 8

Phylis from the Matunis lab will be presenting:

The mammalian Doublesex homolog DMRT1 is a transcriptional gatekeeper that controls the mitosis versus meiosis decision in male germ cells.
Dev Cell 19:612-624
Matson et al. [David Zarkower lab website]

Phylis admits that, "this publication is not related to my field of research. But I find it interesting because it sheds more light on the process that allows mammalian male germ cells to escape meiosis during development."
Agreed! This is a great topic, as the decision of when to stop doing mitosis and start doing meiosis is a fundamental difference between male and female germ cells -- and one of the earliest events of sexual dimorphism!
(And is it just me, or is the term "gatekeeper" being used a lot more to in descriptions of biological processes? Must be a Ghostbusters renaissance.)

Thursday, February 17, 2011

February 22, 2011 journal club

Where and when: Room E6519, Tuesday, 2/22, 12:15 PM
(and apologies up front - for the second RBJC in a row, I have an unavoidable and un-re-schedule-able conflict, and so won't be able to make it. Woe!)

Kate Laws of the Drummond-Barbosa lab will be presenting:

Brat promotes stem cell differentiaton via control of a bistable switch that restricts BMB signaling
Harris et al. [website for Hilary Ashe]
Dev Cell 20:72-83
(hot off the presses! - January 18, 2011)

... an interesting mix of biological studies and mathematical modeling, and obviously a topic near-and-dear to the hearts of Drummond-Barbosa lab members!

Friday, February 4, 2011

February 8, 2011 journal club

Where and when: Room W2303, Tuesday, 2/8, 12:15 PM
(and apologies up front - I will just be getting back from out of town and probably won't be able to make it)

Mandy Wilkinson of the Evans lab will be presenting two papers related to a certain step of fertilization, sperm interaction with the zona pellucida. (This is sort of a smackdown between genetic approaches and structural biology!)

Gamete recognition in mice depends on the cleavage status of an egg's zona pellucida protein
Science 329: 216-219
Gahlay et al. - from Jurrien Dean's group at NIDDK

Insights into egg coat assembly and sperm-egg interaction from the X-ray structure of full-length ZP3
Cell 143: 404-415
Han et al. - from Luca Jovine's group at the Karolinka Institute
Link to the structure


FYI - Perspectives articles related to these papers:
Mechanisms of sperm-egg interactions: Between sugars and broken bonds
Science Signaling 3:pe35

Egg's ZP3 structure speaks volumes
Cell 143: 337-338

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Jan. 25, 2011 journal club

Matt Beattie of the Zirkin lab helps us kick off our 2011 meetings (thanks, Matt!).
We'll meet at 12:15, Tuesday, Jan. 25, in Room E6519.
Matt will be presenting:

ROS inhibit the expression of testicular steroidogenic enzyme genes via the suppression of Nur77 transactivation.
Lee et al.
Free Radical Biology and Medicine, 2009, 47: 1591-1600

As Matt comments about this paper:
"I picked this paper because it is, well it's right in my field of study. This paper wants to establish a basis (via signalling and transcriptional regulation) for steroidogenic aging. While the "cause" of aging is still hotly debated, many groups are trying to establish an aging profile in both constantly dividing and terminally differentiated (or very low turnover) cells. The Leydig cell provides a great example of an aging terminally differentiated cell and allows us to study various aspects of the aging cell while measuring it's capacity to make steroids as a marker for their function."

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

RBJC schedule for Spring 2011

Our meetings for January-May are below --
[roughly] every other Tuesday
(with a few Tuesdays skipped, like for the BMB departmental retreat)
12:15-1:30 PM

  • Presenters - The room reservation starts at 12:00, so you can get in a little early for set-up.
  • Everyone - Please note that we are in two different rooms (alas and once again, we couldn't get E6519 for all our meetings).
1/25/11 - Matt Beattie (Zirkin lab) - Room E6519
2/8/11 - Mandy Wilkinson (Evans lab) - Room W2303
2/22/11 - Kate Laws (Drummond-Barbosa lab) - Room E6519
3/8/11 - Phylis Hetie (Matunis lab) -
Room W2303
3/22/11 - Min-Young Kim (Drummond-Barbosa lab) - Room E6519
4/12/11 - Shiying Jin (Zirkin lab)- Room W2303
4/26/11 - Andrew Wolfe (Yay! A faculty member stepping up to present!) - Room E6519
5/17/11 - Dolly Singh (Wright lab) - Room E6519