I was in London on Friday for the latest progress meeting of the SysMIC project. It's a project funded by the BBSRC as a resource for members of its research community: from graduates beginning their career through to established researchers wishing to improve their skills in mathematical and systems biology.Here's the course syllabus. There's also an overview of how SysMIC connects to the BBSRC's new doctoral training programmes (SysMIC briefing for DTP students - Word file).At the moment it's being 'road-tested' by some early adopter PhD students (and by me, the only member of the team with what might be classed as 'rusty' mathematical skills). At the end of our meeting, we wandered over to the computing lab to chat to these students, who all seemed to be engaging really well. It goes live to registered members of the BBSRC research community in January 2013 - the first cohort of students are PhD students in the new Doctoral Training Partnerships.I tend to focus more on the mathematical aspects of SysMIC: partly this reflects applications of this kind of training in the biological sciences, and partly because I perceive a rather changeable definition of 'Systems Biology'. I prefer to think in terms of developing models and using those in a predictive way to design and interpret experiments (my own definition of Systems Biology would be of mathematical modelling that integrates multiple and diverse data sources to model complex systems).I'm working through the material that's been prepared so far, and having fun with MatLab, the mathematics platform we chose for SysMIC, and while I have to say I've yet to move on to anything mathematically serious, I can see how a more mathematical approach could benefit my own research.
The latest in the ongoing saga of our fly shipment from the USA is that our packet of flies finally made it to the lab. They've been in transit for exactly three weeks*, and of course kept in in known conditions. I'm very grateful to various people at Animal Health, who were able to make an exception to the regulations.
Nonetheless, I think the application of tight control of over the international transport of live insects such as these is a bit over the top - the legislation that I've looked through seems principally aimed at commercially important farm stock and other animals important to the human food chain. I understand there's a general unhappiness in the UK Drosophila research community, especially since the international postal union recently relaxed its regulations regarding the transport of live Drosophila through regular mail. I'm not particularly optimistic that we can make a change to the enforcement of the new regulations, but it's most definitely worth a try.
I have been conducting research using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster since I started my PhD in 1982. In that time I have imported countless consignments of fly strains through the post and by courier (such as Federal Express). On only one occasion can I recall having difficulty getting them through customs - a box of female-sterile mutants from France got stuck, and was in a frightful state when they arrived (this was during my PhD).
The general practise is for the sender to affix one of those green customs tags, asserting that the contents are a gift, of no commercial value (typically $1 may be quoted), that they are live insects, but not an agruicultural pest or a vector of disease. So for over 26 years as a practising Drosophila geneticist, I've had but one case where this has presented a problem.
It's all got rather Kafka-esque as I try to resolve the ongoing Drosophila importation crisis! It transpires that the people who have decided that importation of Drosophila should be covered by legislation aimed quite properly at preventing the import of diseased farm animals are a subsidiary of Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) called Animal Health.
Now clearly these people have a vitally important job, particularly in light of recent outbreaks of bluetongue, foot and mouth and the potential threat of avian influenza (to which we can add the problems currently afflicting honey bees). But nowhere on their website do I see indication of why they feel they need to hold up my harmless flies, which are not an agricultural pest, transmit no disease, are not harmful, and in any case would be unable to survive outdoors anyway. To add to that list of characteristics, these are weak strains carrying recessive lethal mutations. This is how they describe themselves and their responsibilities:
The latest publication from our project investigating a Drosophila homologue of WRN exonuclease is now online.
Ivan Boubriak, Penelope A. Mason, David J. Clancy, Joel Dockray, Robert D. C. Saunders, Lynne S. Cox (2008). DmWRNexo is a 3′–5′ exonuclease: phenotypic and biochemical characterization of mutants of the Drosophila orthologue of human WRN exonuclease Biogerontology DOI: 10.1007/s10522-008-9181-3
The header images are all related to Drosophila:
Above: These are the giant polytene chromosomes found in a variety of tissues in Drosophila - these are from the salivary gland cells of the third instar larva. Calvin Bridges (see picture of the fly lab below) devised maps based on the banding patterns of these chromosomes - maps still in use today.
Here's an cool page showing academic pedigrees of Drosophila workers: FlyTree.
It's interesting to see how few steps it takes to get back as far as T. H. Morgan! For example, here's where I fit in the grand scheme: Robert in FlyTree.
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]
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
My friend and colleague Lynne Cox is chairing the organising committee of a meeting to be held at Oriel College, Oxford, in July 2008. This meeting promises to be an excellent opportunity for networking and establishing collaborations in this field. Lynne asked me to join the committee and design a website.
Click on the meeting logo to visit the conference website.