My thursday roundup

All is well with my tissue culture. I didn’t completely botch yesterday’s experiment (I mean all clear buffers should be ok!!!), so I’m taking some time to do read stuff that catches my eye today.

From this week’s Nature and Nature alert:

1) The platypus genome was just published. It was very interesting to see that the genome in a way reflected the major physical characteristics of the platypus. There were conserved genome regions that are similar to reptiles, birds and mammals. This isn’t something I’m normally too interested in, as I don’t have the resources to look at all this data or the knowledge to reasonably interpret it, but platypuses are just so weird, I thought it would be worth mentioning.

2) An interesting PNAS article dealing with bacterial symbionts of surgeonfish that belong to the Epulopiscium spp.

Unstable MFs

Part of my work involves using the gpt delta transgenic mouse model, which was first described by Nohmi et al. 1996. Well Nohmi has made this into a veritable industry churning out a bunch of papers with a whole host of collaborators. There are even spin-off gpt delta transgenic rat model and the gpt delta transgenic cell line! Watch out Big Blue and MutaMouse!

Well this post has seen the light of day, perhaps not so much for its relevance to microbes (oops), but because it’s something I have to deal with. Anyway, if you are familiar with Big Blue, you’ll understand exactly how this works. Otherwise it’s convoluted and I normally have to recur to many diagrams to get it across. The gist of it is a rodent that has had bacteriophage genomes knocked in at a certain intron. The bacteriophage are not actively used by the rodent but are present in every cell of its body. It’s believed that the phage genome can be used as a reporter of the background levels of mutations perceived by the rodent.