I'm still waiting on official approval from UQ's powers that be, but I will be visiting the U.S. and Germany this July-August.
July 9-15: Auburn (with a trip to NC for friends' wedding)
July 15-21: Friday Harbor Labs
July 21-31: Auburn
August 1-10: Berlin (for the International Conference of Invertebrate Morphology)
August 10-24: Auburn, St. Louis, and Destin, FL (for my sissie's wedding!). Details forthcoming...
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Saturday, June 14, 2014
My cup overflowith
One challenge I've faced in my project studying aculiferan biomineralization has been getting samples of aplacophorans suitable for RNA-based work. Often times, aplacs can be rare and I really need multiple specimens to have biological replicates for some of the experiments I plan to do. I had hoped to collect Epimenia here in Australia but so far that hasn't panned out. Fortunately, my wonderful collaborator and friend Dr. Christiane Todt was just on a cruise and collected tons of specimens of Stylomenia sulcodoryata and Chaetoderma nitidulum as well as one specimen each of Neomenia carinata and Scutopus ventrolineatus. Now I'm armed with plenty of material for traditional transcriptomes of mantle tissue a well as laser capture microdsisection and CEL-seq and in situ hybridization to look at gene expression in the cells secreting sclerites in these beasts as well as proteomic work looking at the protein component of the sclerites.
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| Stylomenia sulcodoryata (source: http://www.artsdatabanken.no/Article/Article/398) |
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| Chaetoderma (source: http://www.whoi.edu/science/B/aplacophora/defchaetneo.html) |
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Pleurobrachia bachei (Ctenophora) genome published in Nature this week
No, it's not an aculiferan mollusc but I just had to post about this...
Our paper on the genome of the ctenophore Pleurobrachia bachei was published this week in Nature! I'm really proud to have had a part in this exciting work and I'm eager to see what the future holds for some of the unanswered questions and surprising findings made here and by the Mnemiopsis leidyi genome study.
Link to the paper itself at Nature
Link to News & Views write-up by Andy Hejnol
Our paper on the genome of the ctenophore Pleurobrachia bachei was published this week in Nature! I'm really proud to have had a part in this exciting work and I'm eager to see what the future holds for some of the unanswered questions and surprising findings made here and by the Mnemiopsis leidyi genome study.
Link to the paper itself at Nature
Link to News & Views write-up by Andy Hejnol
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