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.)
Wednesday, October 19, 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!]
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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