or so my spies tell me... and only a slight exaggeration in the previous statement. in any case, congratulations to Mart, author of many of my favorite recent cell cc for being promoted to professor of systems biology!
Great paper just out in Mol Cell (which is publishing some great systems biology, ahem) by Aoki et al (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1097276513006850). They previously developed a FRET sensor for Erk activity, which has just an exceptional dynamic range; this is clearly a tool that works - as evidenced from the work of Albeck et al (also in mol cell). Aoki et al use a combination of drugs to examine how the MAPK signaling network is producing these spikes of activity as a result of a constant input signal. To control the dynamics on time scales associated with MAPK signaling optogenetics promises to be an important tool as photoswitching is fast and doesn't involved the stress of media change on mammalian cells that is associated with microfluidics. The one caveat to Aoki et al though is that I wasn't quite convinced that the cells experiencing pulses of activity induced by the optogenetic system would proliferate more quickly than the cells experiencing continuous activity, but that is a small caveat in what I think is an important step forward for quantitative signaling.
link here for the english article. no, that is not a picture of Mardo. Mardo is pictured here. in case one was wondering, Mardo performed some amazing biochemistry of the CDK enzyme. groundbreaking stuff - link here to download his thesis.
given that it takes us about a year between first submission and our work appearing in print for other scientists to read, a preprint server makes a lot of sense. the nature journals are even on board. cell press is not. perhaps time to apply some pressure. if you know an editor, send them an email saying you want to submit a preprint to the server! we are supposed to be living in the age of information after all
the next great tech capital of the world
yglesias' comment is highly unlikely, but it would be nice for the academic community if the valley cooled down a bit and outsourced a little faster. postdocs and students (and faculty) have to live here as well