Check out this video from a camera strapped to an eagle flying in the french alps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3QrhdfLCO8&feature=player_embedded#t=21
awesome
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Congratulations to Elena Kassianidou, a former undergraduate student in the lab now doing her phd at Berkeley, who was just awarded an HHMI international doctoral fellowship!
Our review of G1/S transcription was just published in Nature Reviews MCB, and is available at http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v14/n8/abs/nrm3629.html. The review was the most downloaded last week, which was against the odds as it beat out work on the hot topics of microRNAs and stem cells.
It was at the Beckman Center and hosted by the UC Irvine systems biology crowd. It was a very nice meeting and I learned a lot; I also hope the stem cell differentiation crowd will pick up on the work from Andreas and Umut as they are approaching similar problems related to temporal aspects of gene expression and commitment points as we as reversible decisions. I also really like the following piece of art that hung in my hotel room in the Newport Beach Hyatt
The girl is looking coy, but it is the two guys holding hands... That this piece is in hotels in conservative parts of California is pretty cool. I'm feeling optimistic as well.
A paper from Mike Harris in the de Bruin lab http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23593391 just showed SBF binding on the Swi4 promoter in yeast. So the central TF of the G1/S transition sits on its own promoter, just like E2F1-3 binding on the E2F1 promoter in mammalian cells. This continues the uncanny likeness between the yeast and mammalian G1 control networks despite lack of conservation at the level of protein sequence (see Cross, Buchler and Skotheim http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22084380). We decided to go back and analyze SWI4 in the context of transcription timing as discussed our paper Eser et al 2011. It turns out the data for SWI4 in our CDC20 block release experiments were not good so we could not reliably detect transcriptional activation times. However, in the G1 block-release experiments we do see nice early activation of SWI4 transcription consistent with Mike's data and consistent with our feedback-first model in which we predict feedback loop elements responsible for cell cycle commitment get activated prior to other co-regulated genes. Nice!