apalazzo | November 6, 2007
One reason that microscopy is such an important tool for biological research is that biological entities function in part through their organization. Just take a look at any micrograph and you will see order, organization and compartmentalization.
But much of the organization that produces biological activity is yet to be uncovered. To highlight this I'll just point out a recent paper on mRNA distribution within a developing embryo.
In this study (published in a recent issue of Cell, see cover left), researchers embarked on a large scale analysis of mRNA localization in developing Drosophila…
apalazzo | November 2, 2007For those in the Boston metro area.
First up, next Friday, November 9th, there will be a conference being held here at the Medical Campus entitled Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences. Not only is fellow blogger Anna Kushnir part of the organizing committee, but Bora Zivkovic (from A Blog Around the Clock) is one of the invited panelists.
Here is the program:
"Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences"
Friday, November 9, 1:00 - 6:00 pm
TMEC Walter Amphitheater, Harvard Medical School
260 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA…
apalazzo | November 2, 2007Yes it's time for this week's mystery campus. And I don't want to disappoint you, especially after this crushing decision, but Stephen, it's not your alma mater.
So with out further delay, here it is:
Since there is a big hint right on the image itself, all that I'll say is that some of the labs are located in the building at the far end of the field.
ádh mór ort!
apalazzo | November 1, 2007So this morning baymate was telling me how she's taking a course called Intro to Maya with Gael McGill, a former gradstudent here at Harvard Med School. Gael co-founded Digizyme and gained quite a bit of attention with his fantastic "cellular movie". You know the one where a kinesin motor protein drags a vesicle along a microtubule.
Gael is teaching gradstudents and postdocs here at Harvard Medical School how to use Maya, a program used to generate animated 3D-movies of the type popularized by Pixar Studios. There are even plans to have a repository of 3D animations of cellular phenomena…
apalazzo | October 31, 2007I would like to thank the speakers and all of you who attended our NERD Club (New England RNA Data Club). One amazing aspect of our club is the diversity of the topics included. Last night we had talks about mTOR signalling (TOR = Target of rapamycin) and how it activates the translation of certain mRNAs. TOR signalling is fascinating. It is the major way that cells assess the nutritional status of the cell. If the nutrient levels plummet, TOR signalling will inhibit a lot of the translation in the cell. Recently TOR signalling has been shown to be important in all sorts of translational…
apalazzo | October 29, 2007Last week I saw an awesome lecture by Gaudenz Danuser who has a lab at the Scripps institute in San Diego. It has taken me a week to fully digest what was said, plus I haven't had the time to jot this down.
Over the past few years the Danuser lab along with Claire Waterman-Storer's group (see this post and then this post) have used speckle microscopy in order to figure out how the actin cytoskeleton is reorganized during migration. In the process they've really made quite a bit of headway in figuring out how cells crawl.
Actin is just cool. It is the main polymer responsible for shaping the…
apalazzo | October 28, 2007Some beautiful images taken by my good friend Jan Schmorandzer are being displayed at the M.W. Offit Gallery in the Gottesman Library at Columbia's Teacher's College.
For more information visit: www.CellPortraits.blogsplot.com www.CellPortraits.blogspot.com
(The blog includes a cool video of Jan preparing his samples.)
apalazzo | October 26, 2007Over the past month, many have asked me to reinstate this Friday feature. So after a 6 month hiatus, I present to you this week's mystery campus:
hint:One might think of an answer
But is it true?
Trying to disprove it
Is all that's left to do.
If this makes any sense to you, leave a comment. If not, take a wild guess.
apalazzo | October 25, 2007All the info is here. A copy of the resignation letter can be found here.
[HT: Eye on DNA]
apalazzo | October 24, 2007Last night, the US Senate approved the Labor-HHS appropriations bill that includes a provision requiring all NIH funded studies to be available free of charge (i.e. Open Access). Furthermore, the bill passed 75-19 preventing any possibility of a veto. And the Inhofe amendments? From Open Access News:
Inhofe withdrew his anti-OA amendments earlier in the day and as a result the bill passed with the OA mandate for the NIH intact. However, Inhofe did file a "colloquy" (statement for the record to be included as part of the legislative history) objecting to the NIH provision and asking the House…
apalazzo | October 24, 2007Here is the email I sent out today:
Hello All,
The next meeting of the New England RNA Club will take place October 30th starting at 6:00PM in the Cannon Room of Building C at Harvard Medical School. Our speakers will be:
- Xiaoju (Max) Ma, Blenis Lab (HMS)
- Andrew Grimson, Bartel Lab (Whitehead)
- Ming-Chung Kan, Richter Lab (U Mass Worcester)
Food and beverages will be served after the talks. This meeting is sponsored by MERCK, Qiagen, Alnylam and The Department of Cell Biology HMS. If you are driving in and need parking, please let us know before Friday so that we can make…
apalazzo | October 24, 2007I'm sick and tired of this debate of "do you believe in evolution?" Who cares? Who freakin' cares?
You see to me belief is cheap. Any person can claim to believe in any old idea. So what if Obama and Hillary believe in evolution and Huckabee believes in creationism? What I want ...what I expect from my elected officials (and from any well educated person) is that they understand evolution. Yes that is what truly matters.
When the debate revolves around belief, it is really about who do you trust ... the scientific establishment or the leaders of certain clerical movements. With this context,…
apalazzo | October 23, 2007OK here is some background.
AAP: American Association of Publishers.
They are behind PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine), a lobby against Open Access (OA). This organization was set up based on suggestions from Eric Dezenhall, a lobbyist has worked for Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling and ExxonMobil.
ACS: American Chemical Society. This non-profit professional association was founded in 1876 and has approximately 160,000 members who work in academic and industrial labs. ACS publishes several journals including JACS and the newsletter C&EN.
Of course ACS, is a…
apalazzo | October 22, 2007This site says it all.
If you are wondering why the American Chemical Society is fighting open access, the answer is simple ... ACS management receives bonuses that are tied to the revenues generated from ACS publications. They are also paid in part with money collected from membership dues (yes, if you are a member of the ACS you pay part of their salaries.)
So if you are upset about the state of affairs let the ACS know.
See entries by BK, petermr, Everyday Scientist and over at The Chem Blog.
apalazzo | October 22, 2007As you probably know, today the US Senate votes on amendments sponsored by Senator Inhofe (Rep. - OK) which would effectively nullify parts of the the bill (FY08 Labor-HHS Bill) that would require all NIH funded work to be published in a media freely accessible to the public (i.e. Open Access).
Inhofe's amendments are,
Amendment 3416 - Strike this passage from the bill:
The Director of the National Institutes of
Health shall require that all investigators funded by the
NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National
Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic
version of their…
apalazzo | October 19, 2007This week has just come and gone. I didn't do a single experiment. As for the blog, I typed two measly entries. But I did finalize my PLoS paper, give journal club and prepare for the next New England RNA Data Club. It's taking place here at Harvard Medical School on October 30th.
So what else happened this week?
Yes, I heard about the whole Watson affair. (BTM do you have anything to say? I guess the last time Watson was served by a black waiter, our Nobel laureate didn't tip well ...) The latest in this story is that he just got reprimanded by the Board of Trustees at Cold Spring Harbor.…
apalazzo | October 18, 2007So I heard about this PNAS paper all summer long but never got around to reading it until yesterday.
Neutrophils are white blood cells, whose job it is to chase around invaders that enter your bodily fluids. They can sense foreign invaders by sensing chemical traces. Thus the chemical traces are said to be chemoatractants for the neutrophils. A couple of weeks ago I showed you a movie of a migrating neutrophil chasing a bacterium. Here it is again:
It turns out that if you uniformly stimulate migration by giving the cells a uniform dose of chemoatractant, cells start to migrate in seemingly…
apalazzo | October 17, 2007... from my long extended vacation. And it's been over 3 weeks since I last posted anything original. (Hope you didn't mind all those reposts). So, what has happened since then?
The Nobels came out, and although I hadn't predicted any winners, the author of a certain comment did call the Medicine winners (3 out of 3!) Kudos to you kobeboy.
In other news, my manuscript got accepted at PLoS Biology. As soon as I can figure out what is happening with their server I'll sending them the final figures.
And of course I have tons of pictures and stories from Europe ... including many sciency things…
apalazzo | October 12, 2007I'm on the last bit of my protracted vacation. I'll be back on Monday. To commemorate work (got to get back into that mind-set) here's a little rant I posted last year.
Here's a tale from the lab.
Today we had an interesting discussion. It started off with PBS and ended up on the topic of understanding the principles behind much of the protocols used in a lab.
It all started when a rotation student asked if there was a lab stock of PBS (phosphate buffered saline), a common buffer used in the lab. Another postdoc informed the student that there wasn't a lab stock and she did not have any at…
apalazzo | October 11, 2007By now I should be flying in to Paris to meetup with some old friends. Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at the Universite Pierre & Marie Curie entitled: The Signal Sequence Coding Region: promoting nuclear export of mRNA, and ER targeting of translated protein. Here is a post from a year ago. At the time I was visiting Edgar who was then living in New York ...
After the death of my computer I decided to take the Chinatown express (15$ buys you a ticket from Boston to Chinatown NYC) and visit some old friends. Last night, what we call the Portuguese Mafia (aka the Federation of Portuguese…