Archived News from the Department of Genetics : 2010
December 2010
Russell Group paper is PLoS Editors' Pick of the Week
Lisa Meadows, Sang Chan, John Roote and Steve Russell saw the fruits of a lengthy experiment disseminated on open access in PLoS Biology this week. The work, an Editors' Pick of the Week, examined the consequences of disrupting gene expression neighbourhoods in the Drosophila genome using targeted inversions. Surprisingly there was little effect on gene expression in the disrupted neighbourhoods, suggesting that co-ordinate regulation is not what is selected for in driving this conserved aspect of genome organisation.
Citation: Meadows LA, Chan YS, Roote J, Russell S (2010) Neighbourhood Continuity Is Not Required for Correct Testis Gene Expression in Drosophila. PLoS Biology 8:e1000552
Read the paper at http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000552
Commentary at http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001002
iGem team triumphs again!
The Cambridge iGEM team [which included Ben Reeve and Theo Sanderson, both now studying for Part II Genetics] finished in the top 6 of the 120 teams featuring in this year's competition, winning a gold medal and a mention in New Scientist.
They had built a set of parts to allow bioluminescence in E. coli, with potential applications in biosensors, and perhaps even lighting. The team took sequences from two species of fireflies and the marine bacterium Vibrio fischeri to produce "BioBricks" which allowed a range of coloured light outputs and worked to increase the intensity and longevity of light emission.
Cambridge iGEM Team site: http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge
Read the New Scientist Article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827885.000-glowing-trees-could-light-up-city-streets.html
More from Cambridge about the iGEM competition: http://www.synbio.org.uk/igem/1025-igem-competition.html
Official IGEM website, including information on 2011 competition: http://ung.igem.org/Main_Page
November 2010
Dr John Welch joins the Department
At the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, the Department of Genetics welcomed a new member of the Evolutionary Genetics 'team', Dr John Welch, who comes to us from the University of Edinburgh.
John's research investigates a range of questions in molecular evolution, with a particular focus on adaptive evolution. His work combines theoretical modelling, with DNA sequence analysis and comparative methods. This is John's first lectureship, and he is excited about the opportunity for developing new collaborative projects within the Department and connected institutions in Cambridge. He is currently seeking applications for Postgraduate studentships.
See John's Lab page and website
Glover Group paper in 'Nature'
On 7 October, members of the Glover Group saw their paper 'Asterless is a scaffold for the onset of centriole assembly' published in Nature [Nature 467: 714–718 ] > Abstract from 'Nature'.
Centrioles are essential organelles for the formation of cilia, flagella and the centrosomes that organize microtubules in animal cells. Defects in centriole duplication can lead to tumorigenesis, microcephaly or ciliary diseases. The Polo-like kinase 4 (Plk4) is known to be a master regulator of centriole assembly, but we still know very little about how it controls this process. Members of the Group have identified how Plk4 is recruited to centrioles to enable its function. They found that the centriolar protein Asterless (Asl) serves as a scaffold for the binding of both Plk4 and another centriolar protein Sas-4, allowing the onset of new centriole formation. Asl controls centriole duplication in a similar fashion to Plk4. If overexpressed each of these two proteins causes centriole over-amplification or de novo formation, while their depletion/mutation leads to a block in the duplication process. The authors also show that Asl has a function in centrosome maturation, which is independent from its role in centriole biogenesis.
Nikola Dzhindzhev first worked in the Glover Lab as a visiting student from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, working on identifying mitotic genes on the X-chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster. He is now back in the Lab as a Post-Doc studying centrosomes and their biogenesis. Dawn Yu is working on centrosome duplication in the Glover Lab.
July 2010
23 July - Adam Corrigan's work in the Draviam laboratory has won a poster award at the Biophysics 2010 Conference, organised by the British Biophysical Society. By developing a semi-automated routine for quantifying the dynamics of spindle orientation, using high-throughput image processing techniques, this work shows that in human epithelial cells, mitotic spindles exhibit two distinct behaviour: a biased directed motion as the spindle is guided towards the division plane and a non-directed 'jiggling' movement as it's restrained from drifting away from the division plane. This work is supported by a grant from Cambridge Cancer Research for a collaborative project between the Draviam laboratory, Department of Genetics and the Donald laboratory, Cavendish laboratory.
Legend: cartoon of mitotic spindle apparatus with chromosomes in blue and microtubules in red and cell cortex in green (Image copyright A. Corrigan)
12 July - Members of the Department who hail from Spain reminded those from all other nations of the continuing superiority of their football team, and proudly sported their red shirts [and less proudly, their hangovers]. Other Dept. members had adopted an array of shirts in support of various teams to no avail, and we now have a plentiful supply of dusters in many pretty colours. In the photo, Head of Department Cahir O'Kane congratulates Prof Alfonso Martinez Arias on his team's success and enquires when the celebratory sangria is likely to be available, in commiseration for the losers.
June 2010
Potential diagnostic tool for aggressive cancers wins competition
An interdisciplinary team led by Viji M. Draviam, including Roshan Shrestha and Yingjun Liu (all Department of Genetics), Nigel Miller (Department of Pathology) and Nishanth Sastry (Computer Laboratory), have won the CambridgeSens Innovation Competition for their design idea of a 'flourescence based automatic centromere counter in living cells'. The team hopes to develop the centromere counter into an useful diagnostic tool for aggressive cancers.
Information about CambridgeSens, and the competition, can be found at: http://www.sensors.cam.ac.uk/
A movie relating to the project can be viewed at : http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/~vmd20/movies/nuf2cbmitosistiffs/nuf2cbmitosis.mov. The green areas in the movie are centromeres and the proposed sensor is designed to count them.
UK Ladybird Survey enlists the help of 10,000 schools to improve recording of sightings
Dr Remy Ware [Ladybird Group] and colleagues from Anglia Ruskin University and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology are enlisting school children's help to enhance recordings of ladybird sightings in the UK. The Ladybird Survey has been operating successfully for 5 years, and public sightings of invasive harlequins as well as other species have proved critical : it was a sighting of a 'strange ladybird' by a member of the public in 2004 that alerted scientists to the unfortunate fact that the harlequin had finally arrived in Britain. See the University news page for information about the recent launch and a link to the survey, and our harlequin webpage.
April 2010
Boris Adryan secures ARTS award
Boris Adryan [Adryan Lab] and Robert Glen have won the Apple Research and Technology Support Award 2010, for hardware and software to support their research project entitled From atom environments to genomes to organisms : Understanding transcriptional regulation on every level >> Read more
John Roote, cover boy
John Roote, manager of the Fly Facility features on the cover of the April/May edition of CAM Newsletter. In an article about the use of Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism in the past, present and future, Professor Michael Ashburner explians why the fruit fly has been used so much in research into human diseases, and Dr Damian Crowther describes how his team observe flies walking to determine how much they are affected by Alzheimer's disease.
March 2010
Human Frontier Science Program Grant Award
Professor Alfonso Martinez Arias has been awarded a research grant by the Human Frontier Science Program to co-operate with colleagues from the Harvard Medical School and the Sloan-Kettering Institute on a project entitled 'Information processing by signal transduction and gene regulatory networks in mammalian cells'
Another step towards preventing Alzheimer's disease
Dr Damian Crowther and Dr Leila Luheshi [Crowther Lab] are part of a team that has been working on an 'Affibody' molecule that can prevent a toxic protein involved in the development of Alzheimer’s disease from building up in the brain. The research was published on 16 March in PLoS Biology:
Luheishi et al : Sequestration of the Aβ Peptide Prevents Toxicity and Promotes Degradation In Vivo >> Read the paper
More information on the University of Cambridge news pages
Remy Ware wins award
Remy Ware, group leader of the Ladybird Group, has just won the Royal Entomological Society's award for best paper in the journal Ecological Entomology. She co-wrote “Effects of competition, cannabalism and intra-guild predation on larval development of the European coccinellid Adalia bipunctata and the invasive species Harmonia axyridis" with Benjamin Yguel and the late Mike Majerus [Ecological Entomology 34: 12-19 (2009)]
New member of the research team
We are pleased to announce that Dr Rafael Carazo Salas is joining the Department, with a Lab in the Gurdon Institute. Rafael comes to us from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He uses the model organism Saccharomyces pombe to examine how genes and proteins collectively give rise to robust intracellular architecture and remodelling; how physical and genomic/proteomic constraints influence cell shape and plasticity; and how cell structure and function affect each other. Having worked in multidisciplinary research [biology, maths and physics], he is committed to encouraging co-operation between the different branches of science, and promoting the necessity of quantitative methods in biology.
As of June 2010, Dr Carazo Salas' web page is available at http://www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/carazosalas.html
February 2010
Science and art collaborate at the Wellcome
Information about E. Chromi, developed by the winning iGEM team [see below] is now on display - together with the BioBrick winners' trophy - in the windows of the Wellcome Trust HQ in Euston Road, London. >> MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Winning students - not once but twice!
At the iGEM Jamboree in October/November 2009, the Cambridge team [which included Department members Dr Duncan Rowe and Part II student Crispian Wilson - with purple hair in the image on the right] won the overall Grand Prize, as well as the Best Environment trophy. They developed E. Chromi 'sensor' bacteria, which have the potential to change colour if toxins are present. Cambridge participates in the iGEM competition every summer vacation, and current undergraduates are encourages to apply to join the team. Further details about the 2009 win are on the iGEM2009 and Synthetic Biology websites. Anyone interested in iGEM 2010 can find details on http://2010.igem.org/
Then, in December 2009, five members of the Part II class of 2006/07 [Lizzie Day, Fan Cheng, Sarah Leigh-Brown, Harry Harris and Daniel Naujocks] won this year's BBSRC Biotechnology YES [Young Entrepreneurs' Scheme] competition. Harry Harris and Fan Cheng are still members of the Department, studying for PhDs. They formed a hypothetical company, Gluten Replacement Technologies Ltd, which produced an imaginary product called GlutaSafe – a cheap, non-allergenic gluten replacement.
For further details, see the BBSRC website
Professor Alfonso Martinez Arias has been appointed Exective Director of the interdepartmental Physics of Medicine Initiative (PoM) from January 2010, replacing Professor Athene Donald. Professor Alfonso Martinez Arias's research focuses on the mechanisms governing the interactions between signaling systems and transcription in the generation of cell diversity, and on the role of mechanical forces in shaping tissues and organs. See his Lab website. He has been working closely with the Physics of Medicine initiative since its inception,, and was instrumental in the foundation of the Physics of Living Matter Symposia held in Cambridge for the last four years. More information.
Professor Martinez Arias has also been awarded an Advanced Investigator grant from the European Research Council to study the "Molecular origin and function of dynamic heterogeneities in mouse ES cells and preimplantation embryos". These ERC awards support exceptional, professorial-level research leaders in undertaking groundbreaking, high-impact research projects.
Meeting James Watson. James Duboff, a Second Year PhD student in Genetics, met James Watson at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratories in early January 2010. After discussing his research and Cambridge life, James (Jr.) was instructed by James (Sr.) to 'discover a cure for Cancer...we don't need any more money, just the brains...glycolysis is the key'. James Duboff is currently investigating indole signalling in E. coli in the Summers Lab
Earlier news - No longer available
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