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