May 29, 2012 journal club

• When:  Tuesday, May 29, 12:15 PM
• Where:  Room E6519, BSPH

Melvin Rouse from Greg Ball's lab will be presenting -- come out and support him because he has been a real trooper coming over from Homewood campus for our journal club meetings!  (And what the heck, go for some gusto here in the last RBJC of the academic year.)


We'll get to hear something fun and a little different this week.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Greg Ball's lab's work, the general area is behavioral neuroendocrinology, namely, "the interrelation of hormones, brain, and behavior." (and FYI, Greg also has an appointment in Neuroscience).  The work has multiple implications:  how hormones affect the brain, how hormones affect the learning of behaviors, and how various stimuli (including behaviors) can regulate seasonal reproduction.  


Melvin will present two papers related to their work: 

Estradiol-dependent modulation of serotonergic markers in auditory areas of a seasonally breeding songbird. 
Behav Neurosci 126:110-122, Matragrano et al.  [Maney lab website]


Individual differences in the motivation to communicate relate to levels of midbrain and striatal catecholamine markers in male European starlings.
Horm Behav 60:529-539, Heimovics et al. [Riters lab website]

May 15, 2012 journal club

• When:  Tuesday, May 15, 12:15 PM
• Where:  Room E6519, BSPH

May 15 will bring a pinch-hitter presenter -- me, your humble RBJC organizer.  (I had a sympathy for our would-be scheduled presenter, who is mired in a pile of end-of-term assignments.  She agreed she'll present the fall, when she'll be done with her coursework -- hooray!). 

I will present two related papers, mostly focusing on this first one in JCB: 

Ovastacin, a cortical granule protease, cleaves ZP2 in the zona pellucida to prevent polyspermy. 
Burkart et la. (2012)  J Cell Biol 197: 37-44.  [Jurrien Dean's lab website] 


Oocyte-specific oolemmal SAS1B involved in sperm binding through intra-acrosomal SLLP1 during fertilization.  
Sachdev et al. (2012)  Dev Biol 363: 40-51.   [John Herr's lab website]

If you dwell on these titles for a little while, you might think to yourself, "These papers are related?  What is Janice smoking?  Did she give us the wrong papers?"  

I don't blame you for thinking such things.  But scroll down to the bottom of the JCB paper and you'll find: 

      "Note added in proof. While this manuscript was under review, Sachdev et al. (2012. Dev. Biol. doi:10.1016/j.ydbio.2011.12.021) reported on SAS1B, which is the same protein as ovastacin."

So these are two papers, from two different groups, with completely different interests and completely different functions ascribed to this protein.  A thick plot, no?