This wonderful movie has repeatedly popped up into my twitter feed. http://quantixed.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ctenophore.mp4 It was taken by Tessa Montague and is available here (tweet is here). The movie is striking because of the way that cytokinesis starts at one side and moves to the other. Most model systems for cell division have symmetrical division. Rob de Bruin commented that “it makes total sense to segregate this way”.
We have a new paper out. The title is New tools for ‘hot-wiring’ clathrin-mediated endocytosis with temporal and spatial precision . You can read it here. Cells have a plasma membrane which is the barrier between the cell’s interior and the outside world. In order to import material from outside, cells have a special process called endocytosis.
We have a new paper out! This post is to explain what it’s about. Cancer cells often have gene fusions . This happens because the DNA in cancer cells is really messed up. Sometimes, chromosomes can break and get reattached to a different one in a strange way. This means you get a fusion between one gene and another which makes a new gene, called a gene fusion.
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The people This paper really was a team effort. Faye Nixon and Tom Honnor are joint-first authors. Faye did most of the experimental work in the final months of her PhD and Tom came up with the idea for the mathematical modelling and helped to rewrite our analysis method in R. Other people helped in lots of ways.
I’ve returned from the American Society for Cell Biology 2016 meeting in San Francisco. Despite being a cell biologist and people from my lab attending this meeting numerous times, this was my first ASCB meeting. The conference was amazing, so much excellent science and so many opportunities to meet up with people.
This post follows on from “Getting Started“. In the lab we use IgorPRO for pretty much everything. We have many analysis routines that run in Igor, we have scripts for processing microscope metadata etc, and we use it for generating all figures for our papers. Even so, people in the lab engage with it to varying extents. The main battle is that the use of Excel is pretty ubiquitous.
More on the theme of “The Digital Cell“: using quantitative, computational approaches in cell biology. So you want to get started? Well, the short version of this post is: Find something that you need to automate and get going! Programming http://www.instruction-manuals.co.uk/imageIM/four/seven/bbc.gif I make no claim to be a computer wizard.
If you are a cell biologist, you will have noticed the change in emphasis in our field. At one time, cell biology papers were – in the main – qualitative . Micrographs of “representative cells”, western blots of a “typical experiment”… This descriptive style gave way to more quantitative approaches, converting observations into numbers that could be objectively assessed.
Yesterday I tried a gedankenexperiment via Twitter, and asked: If you could visualise a protein relative to an intracellular structure/organelle at ~5 nm resolution, which one would you pick and why? https://twitter.com/clathrin/status/707949738323218432 I got some interesting replies: Myosin Va and cargo on actin filaments in melanocytes – Cleidson Alves @cleidson_alves COPII components relative to ER and Golgi for export of
There have been calls for journals to publish the distribution of citations to the papers they publish (1 2 3). The idea is to turn the focus away from just one number – the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) – and to look at all the data. Some journals have responded by publishing the data that underlie the JIF (EMBO J, Peer J, Royal Soc, Nature Chem). It would be great if more journals did this.