October 25, 2011 journal club

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.)

September 27, 2011 journal club

And we're off to the races for AY 2011-2012!
We'll meet Tuesday, Sept. 27, 12:15 in Room E6519.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Ables of the Drummond-Barbosa lab for kicking us off.
She'll be presenting:

Loss of lysine specific demethylase 1 nonautonomously causes stem cell tumors in the Drosophila ovary
S. Eliazer, N.A. Shalaby, and M. Buszczak
PNAS 2011, 108:7032

She says, "I chose this paper because it describes an intriguing role for epigenetic modifiers, specifically the conserved histone demethylase Lsd1, functions (1) during development to regulate the size of the Drosophila germline stem cell (GSC) niche, and (2) in adult somatic tissue adjacent to the GSCs to limit the production of niche-specific signals that maintain GSCs. Cell autonomous epigenetic control of GSCs has been demonstrated by several labs (including the [Erika] Matunis lab), but to my knowledge, this is the the first report demonstrating that epigenetic modifications also control somatic niche cell development and function."