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!]
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