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.)