Here's a smashing paper - a deeply detailed analysis of the Drosophila escape response. What's more, it's hard to see the usual justifications we need to use in grant applications. And a paper about "looming threats...
Well, I have finally plucked up the courage to present a link to the video press release that the BBSRC issued on youtube:
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQwz2Wv9FU 425x344]
Hong Xu, Steven Z. DeLuca, Patrick H. O'Farrell
Science 25 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5888, pp. 575 - 577
DOI: 10.1126/science.1160226
The publishers seem to be making changes at the Aging Cell web pages. This has meant that the paper is not presently available on open access, for which which Lynne and I paid a significant amount.
In the meantime, I've placed a pdf on this website.
I had a visit from a BBSRC Press Office person on Wednesday 8th May. (The BBSRC are the UK Research Council that fund my current research into ageing, using Drosophila as a model system) This was to record some video footage to accompany a press release concerning a paper that will be published online on Monday 12th May. She went on to visit my collaborator Lynne the following morning.
It was quite a surreal situation - being filmed in the lab while people carried on working. I imagine the raw footage is very funny, with all the false starts and stops - the difficulty was in stopping myself from using technical terms that would be opaque to the general public. Typically I'd be on a bit of a roll, then suddenly grind to a halt having uttered a word like "phenotype" or similar. I have to say that the BBSRC person was most helpful and sympathetic (I presume she deals with inarticulate and camera-shy scientists on a regular basis!).
Our paper in Aging Cell describing the identification and characterisation of a Drosophila orthologue of the exonuclease function of WRN is now available online, and open access.
Both the Open University and Oxford University websites have their own versions of the press release.
Lynne had a TV interview with BBC Oxford yesterday, while I had a radio interview yesterday and another scheduled for tomorrow (broadcast for today and tomorrow respectively).
Our paper in Aging Cell describing the identification and characterisation of a Drosophila orthologue of the exonuclease function of WRN is now available online, and open access.
My laboratory uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model for biological processes, and in particular the biology of oxidative stress resistance and ageing. The value of this organism stems largely from its highly developed background of genetic research, and the sophisticated techniques of genome manipulation which are available.
Keeping Drosophila
The Gal4-UAS system was devised by Andrea Brand and Norbert Perrimon some years ago, and it remains one of the more powerful contributions to the modern Drosophila genetic toolbox.
The system relies on a combination of two engineered P elements. P elements are a naturally occuring transposable element in the Drosophila genome: a complete 2.9kb element encodes a transposase enzyme that catalyses the element's excision and reintergration at novel sites. P elements were the first germline tranformation system developed for Drosophila. An engineered P element contains a marker gene that confers an easily recognised phenotype on flies bearing the element. Nowadays. the most common marker gene is white, which is required for the eyes of the fly to take up the red and brown pigments that give Drosophila its brick red eyes (white is so-named because mutants have white eyes due to an inability to take up pigments).
The first element of the Gal4-UAS system carries to transgene to be expressed, downstream of several copies of the yeast Gal4 Upstream Activating Sequence (UAS). Essentially, the UAS is a sequence to which the yeast Gal4 transcription factor binds, thereby driving transcription of the downstream sequences (in this case, the transgene of interest). In the absence of Gal4, the transgene contained within this element is transcriptionally inactive. We can refer to this element as the responder element.