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!

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).