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2014-07-05 New articles we read this week

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Systems biology

  1. Levo M, Segal E. In pursuit of design principles of regulatory sequences. Nat Rev Genet. 2014 Jul;15(7):453-68. doi: 10.1038/nrg3684. Epub 2014 Jun 10. PubMed PMID: 24913666.
  2. Patel AP, Tirosh I, Trombetta JJ, Shalek AK, Gillespie SM, Wakimoto H, Cahill DP, Nahed BV, Curry WT, Martuza RL, Louis DN, Rozenblatt-Rosen O, Suvà ML, Regev A, Bernstein BE. Single-cell RNA-seq highlights intratumoral heterogeneity in primary glioblastoma. Science. 2014 Jun 20;344(6190):1396-401. doi: 10.1126/science.1254257. Epub 2014 Jun 12. PubMed PMID: 24925914.

Stem cells

  1. Cattaneo E, Corbellini G. Stem cells: taking a stand against pseudoscience. Nature. 2014 Jun 19;509(7505):333-5. PubMed PMID: 24955466.
  2. Bertolotti E, Neri A, Camparini M, Macaluso C, Marigo V. Stem cells as source for retinal pigment epithelium transplantation. Prog Retin Eye Res. 2014 Jun 13. pii: S1350-9462(14)00037-8. doi: 10.1016/j.preteyeres.2014.06.002. [Epub ahead of print] Review. PubMed PMID: 24933042.
  3. Ye L, Wang J, Beyer AI, Teque F, Cradick TJ, Qi Z, Chang JC, Bao G, Muench MO, Yu J, Levy JA, Kan YW. Seamless modification of wild-type induced pluripotent stem cells to the natural CCR5?32 mutation confers resistance to HIV infection. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 9. pii: 201407473. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 24927590.
  4. Park CY, Kim J, Kweon J, Son JS, Lee JS, Yoo JE, Cho SR, Kim JH, Kim JS, Kim DW. Targeted inversion and reversion of the blood coagulation factor 8 gene in human iPS cells using TALENs. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24;111(25):9253-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1323941111. Epub 2014 Jun 9. PubMed PMID: 24927536.

Neuroscience

  1. Rose N. The human brain project: social and ethical challenges. Neuron. 2014 Jun 18;82(6):1212-5. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.06.001. PubMed PMID: 24945767.
  2. Cohen MA, Konkle T, Rhee JY, Nakayama K, Alvarez GA. Processing multiple visual objects is limited by overlap in neural channels. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 17;111(24):8955-60. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1317860111. Epub 2014 Jun 2. PubMed PMID: 24889618.
  3. Prevedel R, Yoon YG, Hoffmann M, Pak N, Wetzstein G, Kato S, Schrödel T, Raskar R, Zimmer M, Boyden ES, Vaziri A. Simultaneous whole-animal 3D imaging of neuronal activity using light-field microscopy. Nat Methods. 2014 Jul;11(7):727-30. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.2964. Epub 2014 May 18. PubMed PMID: 24836920.

Neurobehaviour

  1. Pérez-Escudero A, Vicente-Page J, Hinz RC, Arganda S, de Polavieja GG. idTracker: tracking individuals in a group by automatic identification of unmarked animals. Nat Methods. 2014 Jul;11(7):743-8. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.2994. Epub 2014 Jun 1. PubMed PMID: 24880877.

Psychology

  1. Jung K, Shavitt S, Viswanathan M, Hilbe JM. Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 17;111(24):8782-7. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1402786111. Epub 2014 Jun 2. PubMed PMID: 24889620.

Retinal Development

  1. Laranjeiro R, Whitmore D. Transcription factors involved in retinogenesis are co-opted by the circadian clock following photoreceptor differentiation. Development. 2014 Jun 12. pii: dev.104380. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 24924194.

Eye diseases

  1. Huber-Reggi SP, Mueller KP, Straumann D, Huang MY, Neuhauss SC. Individual Larvae of the Zebrafish Mutant belladonna Display Multiple Infantile Nystagmus-Like Waveforms that Are Influenced by Viewing Conditions. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2014 May 27;55(6):3971-8. doi: 10.1167/iovs.13-13576. PubMed PMID: 24867578.

Zebrafish

  1. Law SH, Sargent TD. The Serine-Threonine Protein Kinase PAK4 Is Dispensable in Zebrafish: Identification of a Morpholino-Generated Pseudophenotype. PLoS One. 2014 Jun 19;9(6):e100268. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0100268. eCollection 2014. PubMed PMID: 24945275.

Genome editing/medicine

  1. Ye L, Wang J, Beyer AI, Teque F, Cradick TJ, Qi Z, Chang JC, Bao G, Muench MO, Yu J, Levy JA, Kan YW. Seamless modification of wild-type induced pluripotent stem cells to the natural CCR5?32 mutation confers resistance to HIV infection. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 9. pii: 201407473. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 24927590.
  2. Park CY, Kim J, Kweon J, Son JS, Lee JS, Yoo JE, Cho SR, Kim JH, Kim JS, Kim DW. Targeted inversion and reversion of the blood coagulation factor 8 gene in human iPS cells using TALENs. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24;111(25):9253-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1323941111. Epub 2014 Jun 9. PubMed PMID: 24927536.
  3. Kiani S, Beal J, Ebrahimkhani MR, Huh J, Hall RN, Xie Z, Li Y, Weiss R. CRISPR
    transcriptional repression devices and layered circuits in mammalian cells. Nat
    Methods. 2014 Jul;11(7):723-6. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.2969. Epub 2014 May 5. PubMed
    PMID: 24797424.
  4. Nissim L, Perli SD, Fridkin A, Perez-Pinera P, Lu TK. Multiplexed and Programmable Regulation of Gene Networks with an Integrated RNA and CRISPR/Cas Toolkit in Human Cells. Mol Cell. 2014 May 22;54(4):698-710. doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2014.04.022. Epub 2014 May 15. PubMed PMID: 24837679.

Drug Discovery

  1. Wang YN, Hou YY, Sun MZ, Zhang CY, Bai G, Zhao X, Feng XZ. Behavioural screening of zebrafish using neuroactive traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions and biological targets. Sci Rep. 2014 Jun 16;4:5311. doi: 10.1038/srep05311. PubMed PMID: 24931174; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4058885.

Science Career

  1. Casadevall A, Fang FC. Causes for the persistence of impact factor mania. MBio. 2014 Mar 18;5(2):e00064-14. doi: 10.1128/mBio.00064-14. PubMed PMID: 24643863; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3967521.

Development

  1. Nicolas M, Hassan BA. Amyloid precursor protein and neural development. Development. 2014 Jul;141(13):2543-8. doi: 10.1242/dev.108712. PubMed PMID: 24961795.
  2. Deneris ES, Hobert O. Maintenance of postmitotic neuronal cell identity. Nat Neurosci. 2014 Jul;17(7):899-907. doi: 10.1038/nn.3731. Epub 2014 Jun 15. PubMed PMID: 24929660.

Methods

  1. Hughes AJ, Spelke DP, Xu Z, Kang CC, Schaffer DV, Herr AE. Single-cell western blotting. Nat Methods. 2014 Jul;11(7):749-55. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.2992. Epub 2014  Jun 1. PubMed PMID: 24880876.
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Uri Alon: Why truly innovative science demands a leap into the unknown

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Just saw this from a friend’s share. It is a great TED talk by Uri Alon on his experience on doing innovative science.

 

His work has inspired many including myself. Here are a few seminal papers by his groups.

  1. Milo R, Shen-Orr S, Itzkovitz S, Kashtan N, Chklovskii D, Alon U. Network motifs: simple building blocks of complex networks. Science. 2002 Oct 25;298(5594):824-7. PubMed PMID: 12399590.
  2. Shen-Orr SS, Milo R, Mangan S, Alon U. Network motifs in the transcriptional regulation network of Escherichia coli. Nat Genet. 2002 May;31(1):64-8. Epub 2002 Apr 22. PubMed PMID: 11967538.
  3. Alon U. Network motifs: theory and experimental approaches. Nat Rev Genet. 2007 Jun;8(6):450-61. Review. PubMed PMID: 17510665.

 

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2014-06-21 new articles we read this week

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Stem cells/ regenerative medicine

  1. Zhong X, Gutierrez C, Xue T, Hampton C, Vergara MN, Cao LH, Peters A, Park TS, Zambidis ET, Meyer JS, Gamm DM, Yau KW, Canto-Soler MV. Generation of three-dimensional retinal tissue with functional photoreceptors from human iPSCs. Nat Commun. 2014 Jun 10;5:4047. doi: 10.1038/ncomms5047. PubMed PMID: 24915161.
  2. Reichman S, Terray A, Slembrouck A, Nanteau C, Orieux G, Habeler W, Nandrot EF, Sahel JA, Monville C, Goureau O. From confluent human iPS cells to self-forming neural retina and retinal pigmented epithelium. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 10;111(23):8518-23. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1324212111. Epub 2014 May 27. PubMed PMID: 24912154.
  3. Chong JJ, Yang X, Don CW, Minami E, Liu YW, Weyers JJ, Mahoney WM, Van Biber B, Cook SM, Palpant NJ, Gantz JA, Fugate JA, Muskheli V, Gough GM, Vogel KW, Astley CA, Hotchkiss CE, Baldessari A, Pabon L, Reinecke H, Gill EA, Nelson V, Kiem HP, Laflamme MA, Murry CE. Human embryonic-stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes regenerate non-human primate hearts. Nature. 2014 Jun 12;510(7504):273-7. doi: 10.1038/nature13233. Epub 2014 Apr 30. PubMed PMID: 24776797.
  4. Normile D, Vogel G. Cell biology. STAP cells succumb to pressure. Science. 2014 Jun 13;344(6189):1215-6. doi: 10.1126/science.344.6189.1215. PubMed PMID: 24925996.

Eye diseases

  1. Agbaga MP, Tam BM, Wong JS, Yang LL, Anderson RE, Moritz OL. Mutant ELOVL4 That Causes Autosomal Dominant Stargardt-3 Macular Dystrophy Is Misrouted to Rod Outer Segment Disks. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2014 May 15;55(6):3669-3680. doi: 10.1167/iovs.13-13099. PubMed PMID: 24833735.

Oxidative stress

  1. Moussavi Nik SH, Croft K, Mori TA, Lardelli M. The comparison of methods for measuring oxidative stress in zebrafish brains. Zebrafish. 2014 Jun;11(3):248-54. doi: 10.1089/zeb.2013.0958. Epub 2014 May 5. PubMed PMID: 24798242.

Molecular Biology

  1. Roberts JW. Molecular biology. Molecular basis of transcription pausing. Science. 2014 Jun 13;344(6189):1226-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1255712. PubMed PMID: 24926002.

Systems Biology

  1. Shalek AK, Satija R, Shuga J, Trombetta JJ, Gennert D, Lu D, Chen P, Gertner RS, Gaublomme JT, Yosef N, Schwartz S, Fowler B, Weaver S, Wang J, Wang X, Ding R, Raychowdhury R, Friedman N, Hacohen N, Park H, May AP, Regev A. Single-cell RNA-seq reveals dynamic paracrine control of cellular variation. Nature. 2014 Jun 11. doi: 10.1038/nature13437. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 24919153.

Synthetic Biology/Gene regulatory Network

  1. Attwater J, Holliger P. A synthetic approach to abiogenesis. Nat Methods. 2014 May;11(5):495-8. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.2893. PubMed PMID: 24781322.
  2. Brophy JA, Voigt CA. Principles of genetic circuit design. Nat Methods. 2014 May;11(5):508-20. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.2926. Review. PubMed PMID: 24781324.

Behaviour

  1. Zhou Y, Cattley RT, Cario CL, Bai Q, Burton EA. Quantification of larval zebrafish motor function in multiwell plates using open-source MATLAB applications. Nat Protoc. 2014 Jul;9(7):1533-48. doi: 10.1038/nprot.2014.094. Epub 2014 Jun 5. PubMed PMID: 24901738.

Education

  1. Wieman CE. Large-scale comparison of science teaching methods sends clear message. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 10;111(23):8319-20. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1407304111. Epub 2014 May 22. PubMed PMID: 24853505.
  2. Zhou M, Lee J. Assessing what is cultural about Asian Americans’ academic advantage. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 10;111(23):8321-2. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1407309111. Epub 2014 May 29. PubMed PMID: 24876277.
  3. Freeman S, Eddy SL, McDonough M, Smith MK, Okoroafor N, Jordt H, Wenderoth MP. Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 10;111(23):8410-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1319030111. Epub 2014 May 12. PubMed PMID: 24821756.
  4. Hsin A, Xie Y. Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 10;111(23):8416-21. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1406402111. Epub 2014 May 5. PubMed PMID: 24799702.

Scientific Career

  1. van Dijk D, Manor O, Carey LB. Publication metrics and success on the academic job market. Curr Biol. 2014 Jun 2;24(11):R516-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.039. PubMed PMID: 24892909.
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The Hum

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Here is a random/interesting article about a sensory phenomenon that occurs across the world.

 

http://mic.com/articles/91091/a-mysterious-sound-is-driving-people-insane-and-nobody-knows-what-s-causing-it?utm_source=policymicFB&utm_medium=main&utm_campaign=social

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Week – 1 in MBL : Genomics Bootcamp

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Saturday, June 14th marked the end of my first week at Woods Hole (I apologize for the late post). It was certainly a genomics bootcamp! In just one week, we learnt to dissect the ventral nerve chords from 3rd instar Drosophila larvae, extracted RNA, did microarrays, analyzed data and came up with hypotheses of what could be happening in our samples. We interacted and worked closely with wonderful TAs and faculty from different universities. This exercise certainly made me appreciate the hard work put in to genomic techniques (especially microarrays, RNAseq) and the enormity of the data obtained.

To celebrate the end of first week, some of us took a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard before charging up for the next section.

“On the Ferry to Martha's Vineyard”

We rented bikes and explored the beautiful island a little bit before settling for a nice picnic on the beach!

America's oldest platform carousel at Martha's Vineyard

Exploring Martha's Vineyard

Thus ended a great first week.
Next post: EPhys !

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My trip to Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, MA.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Lipid synthesis, stem cells, CRISPR, cell differentiation, coffee, faculty life in Puerto Rico, softball, ion channels, PhD in Europe, ball room dancing, buying a house in seattle, Epilepsy, larval Drosophila brain dissection – that’s an eclectic mix of topics to talk about for one day and this is not even an exhaustive list! These topics pretty much sum up my first day here at Woods Hole, where I am a part of the Neurobiology summer course at MBL with 13 other students from different parts of the US and Europe. I am housed at the Ebert hall with another student from the same course. The view from our room is gorgeous!

View from my room overlooking the Eel Pond

We started the day with an orientation/welcome brunch at the swope center. I was pleasantly surprised with the variety of food and taste. For cafeteria food, it was really good. There was everything from cereal, to yogurt parfait, to your-style-eggs and toast, waffles, fruits and vegetables, juice and coffee. There was even ice cream at 9 am! Despite the scorching heat, after the orientation my roommate and I went exploring this quaint nautical town with several beautiful small beaches.

DNA Man

I also just had to try the coffee at the local cafe.

Ok, not an image of coffee. But this was an unusual yet appropriate sign at the cafe

We had to get back to our ‘base’ because of the heat but we got some rest before the course’s first meeting in the afternoon. This session was interesting and we jumped right into a lecture about ion channels and Graeme Davis, one of the directors of the course, outlined some of the questions we are going to work on in the following week. After the lecture, we headed to the lab where I met the larval drosophila for the first time. I have dissected testes from adult flies before, but today we learnt to dissect brain from 3rd instar larvae. The larvae were expressing GFP in their motorneurons which let us take a quick look under fluorescence to see if we destroyed the brain completely or managed to successfully practice isolating the tissue for FACS sorting tomorrow.

GFP expressing motor neurons in Drosophila larvae. I did not do this btw.

The day ended with passionate discussions about science interspersed with pizza and beer!

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2014-06-07 New articles we read this week

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Genome Editing

  1. Gagnon JA, Valen E, Thyme SB, Huang P, Ahkmetova L, Pauli A, Montague TG, Zimmerman S, Richter C, Schier AF. Efficient Mutagenesis by Cas9 Protein-Mediated Oligonucleotide Insertion and Large-Scale Assessment of Single-Guide RNAs. PLoS One. 2014 May 29;9(5):e98186. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0098186. eCollection 2014. PubMed PMID: 24873830.
  2. Hsu PD, Lander ES, Zhang F. Development and Applications of CRISPR-Cas9 for Genome Engineering. Cell. 2014 Jun 5;157(6):1262-1278. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.05.010. Review. PubMed PMID: 24906146.
  3. Torres R, Martin MC, Garcia A, Cigudosa JC, Ramirez JC, Rodriguez-Perales S. Engineering human tumour-associated chromosomal translocations with the RNA-guided CRISPR-Cas9 system. Nat Commun. 2014 Jun 3;5:3964. doi: 10.1038/ncomms4964. PubMed PMID: 24888982.
  4. Yu C, Zhang Y, Yao S, Wei Y. A PCR Based Protocol for Detecting Indel Mutations Induced by TALENs and CRISPR/Cas9 in Zebrafish. PLoS One. 2014 Jun 5;9(6):e98282. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0098282. eCollection 2014. PubMed PMID: 24901507.

Sequencing

  1. Wilson MR, Naccache SN, Samayoa E, Biagtan M, Bashir H, Yu G, Salamat SM, Somasekar S, Federman S, Miller S, Sokolic R, Garabedian E, Candotti F, Buckley RH, Reed KD, Meyer TL, Seroogy CM, Galloway R, Henderson SL, Gern JE, DeRisi JL, Chiu CY. Actionable Diagnosis of Neuroleptospirosis by Next-Generation Sequencing. N Engl J Med. 2014 Jun 4. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 4896819.
  2. Gilissen C, Hehir-Kwa JY, Thung DT, van de Vorst M, van Bon BW, Willemsen MH, Kwint M, Janssen IM, Hoischen A, Schenck A, Leach R, Klein R, Tearle R, Bo T, Pfundt R, Yntema HG, de Vries BB, Kleefstra T, Brunner HG, Vissers LE, Veltman JA. Genome sequencing identifies major causes of severe intellectual disability. Nature. 2014 Jun 4. doi: 10.1038/nature13394. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 24896178.

Stem cells

  1. Dunn SJ, Martello G, Yordanov B, Emmott S, Smith AG. Defining an essential transcription factor program for naïve pluripotency. Science. 2014 Jun 6;344(6188):1156-60. doi: 10.1126/science.1248882. PubMed PMID: 24904165.
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2014 The Twelfth Annual USA Biology Olympiad National Finals

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Fai and Prahatha led a Development and Disease Research Lab section in the 12th USA Biology Olympiad Finals at Purdue University and shared our lab research on eye drug discovery using the zebrafish model. The students also learned essential basic skills for zebrafish research.


photoalbum by USA Biology Olympiad.

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LGBTQ+ Pride Flag (Rainbow Flag) History

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Here is a brief history of the LGBTQ+ pride flag.  http://www.sanfrancisco.travel/media/a-brief-history-of-the-rainbow-flag.html

For more information about Harvey Milk, watch the movie “Milk” released in 2008 staring Sean Penn.  Many people do not know that during WWII the Nazi’s labeled concentration camp prisoners with a variety of labels (You can see the “code” here: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_da.php?ModuleId=10005378&MediaId=5037).  Gay men were assigned an upside down pink triangle for being “homosexuals”.  Gay women were assigned a black upside triangle for being “antisocial” (or basically deviating from social norms).  For many years – including now – many people have reclaimed the upside down pink triangle as a symbol for LGBTQ+ populations.  However, since it does have a violent history, Harvey Milk asked his friend Gilbert Baker to make a symbol that was more inclusive of the community and without this history.  He created a rainbow flag that originally had 8 colours on it.  The colors that have been removed are pink (which stood for sexuality) and indigo (which stood for harmony) for reasons explained in the article.  The current LGBTQ+ pride flag has 6 colours.

The colours stand for:

Red – life
Orange – healing
Yellow – sun
Green – nature
Blue – art
Purple – spirit

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New Information about Health, Weight, and Food.

Saturday, May 31, 2014

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