More good news, Franklin's paper on foraminifera size is accepted at Evolution

F Caval-Holme, JL Payne & JM Skotheim, “Physiological and cell biological limits on protist offspring size” will appear in Evolution.  ​Just a few minor changes left to complete... Good news comes in waves. This is an interesting survey of ~3000 parent offspring pairs of the single celled protist foraminifera. Even though parent and offspring sizes can differ by a thousand fold, they still increase together as larger parents have larger, rather than just more offspring.  So, across eukaryotes, from single to multi-celled, offspring size scales with parent size.

It's out... finally!!!

Feedforward Regulation Ensures Stability and Rapid Reversibility of a Cellular State by Andreas and myself hit the press yesterday over at Mol Cell (our favorite journal). Click here to download. It is a nice paper that unfortunately spent almost 2 years between the first submission and coming out in print illustrating what is wrong with scientific publication. Nevertheless, enough whining, it is a nice paper. Congratulations to Andreas!
This paper touches on many important points including the degree to which small network motifs can be analyzed separately from the larger networks in which they are embedded - a very general, important, and very unresolved issue at the foundations of biologic regulation.

Second lab baby is born!!!

According to the mother, Jenny: "Vanessa Sophie Ritter was born April 18th, 11.22 pm. We are at home and everybody involved is doing fine J  More info soon!"
​

Congratulations to Jenny and Ulrich!​

News of our now famous undergraduate

A nice writeup in the Stanford daily on the winners of the Dean's award for a significant achievement by an undergraduate http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/undergrads-deans-awards-041013.html Congratulations again to Franklin

funniest paragraph in Graur et al - Brenner's distinction between junk and garbage...

To deal with the confusion in the literature, we propose to refresh the memory of those objecting to “junk DNA” by repeating a 15-year old terminological distinction made by Brenner (1998), who astutely differentiated between “junk DNA,” one the one hand, and “garbage DNA,” on the other: “Some years ago I noticed that there are two kinds of rubbish in the world and that most languages have different words to distinguish them. There is the rubbish we keep, which is junk, and the rubbish we throw away, which is garbage. The excess DNA in our genomes is junk, and it is there because it is harmless, as well as being useless, and because the molecular processes generating extra DNA outpace those getting rid of it. Were the extra DNA to become disadvantageous, it would become subject to selection, just as junk that takes up too much space, or is beginning to smell, is instantly converted to garbage … ”.