On Orthologs, GWAS and Fly Models of Disease

A nice mention of the DRSC Integrative Ortholog Prediction Tool (DIOPT) (Hu et al. in BMC Bioinformatics) appeared recently in a Current Biology dispatch highlighting a Drosophila study investigating genes related to Restless Leg Syndrome.

Shaw & Duntley "Neurological Disorders: Towards a Mechanistic Understanding of Restless Leg Syndrome" Current Biology 22(12).

The study highlighted in the dispatch (Freeman et al. "Sleep fragmentation and motor restlessness in a Drosophila model of restless leg syndrome" Current Biology 22:1142-1148") takes human genome-wide association study (GWAS) data into a model system for functional characterization.

Shaw & Duntley state that "one of the most compelling aspects of the approach of Freeman et al. is the successful use of a model system to functionally characterize a susceptibility gene that was original identified in human genome-wide association studies" and that "the use of model systems to functionally characterize genes identified with genome-wide association studies is a move in the right direction."

At the DRSC, we are excited to see that our bioinformatics tools, as well as our RNAi reagents for cells and in vivo, can have a positive impact on the use of Drosophila to study human disease-related genes and develop disease models.

Quote of the Week: Tension

... it is the small or minute organisms, or small cellular elements of larger organisms, whose forms will be governed by surface-tension; while the forms of the larger organisms are due to other and non-molecular forces.

from Sir D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (Abridged Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1961).

Quote of the Week

Everything is collage, even genetics.

- from Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero

Quote of the Week

Enjoying insects is much the same whether you do it in your own garden or in a distant country. The rule is to watch, and interfere as little as possible.

- H. Oldroyd in The Insects in Your Garden (1976, Penguin Books Ltd; England)

Quote of the Week: Contradiction

The female germ cell embodies a most profound contradiction. It must be totipotent, containing within itself all the information needed for the development of a new individual. But it must also be highly differentiated in order to carry out the complex functions required of it.

- Anne McLaren, in Germ Cells and Soma: A New Look at an Old Problem (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1981)

Quote of the Week: Halloween Horrors

The name 'coffin-fly' has been applied to Conicera tibiais of the family Phoridae, because this fly is able to maintain itself through many successive generations in coffined bodies that have been interred for a year or more. The fact has long been known, but even today no one really knows how the fly gets there. It seems unlikely, for a variety of reasons, that the eggs are laid on the body before burial, and so either the adult fly or the larva must find its way down through several feet of soil. This seems a difficult feat when we think of its being performed by each larva or each adult fly, but, as in many problems to do with animals, time and continuity make most things possible.

from The Natural History of Flies by Harold Oldroyd

Quote of the Week: Attachment

Your garden is an insect zoo, where you can go at any time of the year and see what the insects are doing. Some of them come and go, while others stay in the same place all their lives. ... [Most] are not very attractive, like the plant bugs and beetles. This does not mean that they are not interesting, and if you ... look at them every day, you may become quite attached to them.

From, The Insects in Your Garden by Harold Oldroyd

Quote of the Week: Spirals

Of true organic spirals we have no lack. We think at once of horns of ruminants, and of still more exquisitely beautiful molluscan shells ... Closey related spirals may be traced in the florets of a sunflower; a true spiral, though not, by the way, so easy of investigation, is seen in the outline of a clodiform leaf; and yet again, we can recognise typical though transitory spirals in a lock of hair, in a staple of wool, in the coil of an elephant's trunk, in the 'circling spirals' of a snake, in the coils of a cuttle-fish's arm, or of a monkey's or a chameleon's tail.

Among such forms as these, and the many others which we might easily add to them, it is obvious that we have to do with things which, though mathematically similar, are biologically speaking fundamentally different; and not only are they biologically remote, but they are also physically different, in regard to the causes to which they are severally due.

Sir D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form

Quote of the Week

Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of “scientific” knowledge joins the opposite slope of “artistic” imagination?

Vladimir Nabokov (writer and lepidopterist)

Quote of the Week: Ready or Not

There is a widespread view that scientific discoveries are more or less inevitable, and that it makes little difference whether or not a particular individual makes a discovery at a given time: if the time is not ripe for it, it will not be understood and will have little or no effect on future events; if the time is ripe, then someone else will soon make the discovery anyhow.

The history of Mendelism is one of the often-cited examples here. According to this interpretation, Mendel's paper was not understood in 1866 because the time was not ripe ... To me, this account seems greatly oversimplified--though it must be admitted that the development of the subject would probably have been much the same, even to the dates, if Mendel's paper had never been written.

It it true that the paper was ahead of its time, but it was not difficult to understand, and it seems unlikely that it would have remained unappreciated for so long if it had appeared in a less obscure journal, or if Mendel himself had published the further cases that he reported to his letters to Nageli.

A History of Genetics (1965) by A.H. Sturtevant, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

Quote of the Week: Pseudo-Obscure

There seemed to be no end to the tricks that [Drosophila] pseudoobscura could do: one stock had odd sex ratios, another diplayed what seemed to be maternal inheritance, and so on. ... Pseudoobscura was so full of new tricks because it was an undomesticated, wild organism that had not yet been stripped of its natural genetic diversity, as melanogaster had long since been.

In, Lords of the Fly (1994) by R.E. Kohler, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL). pg. 260.

Quote of the Week: Diversity in Paradise

In the 1950s, when D. Elmo Hardy began describing the fantastic diversity of native Drosophila, he realized that a marvelous natural evolutionary experiment was occurring in the island forests. It was as if an earlier geneticist had locked specimens of a close relative of Drosophila melanogaster in a number of extremely large test tubes and allowed them to evolve for thousands or even millions of years ... In 1963, the Hawaiian Drosophila Project began diciphering the genetics and evolution of this amazing group of flies. Over 800 species of Drosophilidae in five genera have been recorded in the islands. This is nearly one-third of the total number of known drosophilid species in the world. Their diversity of form, ecology, and behavior far exceeds the range of known variations in the group outside of Hawai'i.

From Hawaiian Insects and Their Kin (1992) by F.G. Howarth & W. P. Mull. University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, HI). pg.22.

Quote of the Week

Attempting to describe the relationship between a gene and its related phenotype is fraught with hazards.

From, X-Linked Traits: A Catalog of Loci in Nonhuman Mammals (1990) by James R. Miller (Cambridge University Press).

Quote of the Week: Independence Day

Independent assortment the random distribution of the gametes of genes located on different chromosomes. Thus, and individual of genotype Aa Bb will produce equal numbers of four types of gametes: AB, Ab, aB, and ab. See Mendel's laws.

Independent probabilities in a group of events, the occurrence of any one event having no influence on the probability of any other event. For example, the orientation of one pair of homologous chromosomes on the first meiotic metaphase plate does not influence the orientation of any other pair of homologs. See independent assortment.

From, A Dictionary of Genetics (6th Edition), R.C. King & W. D. Stansfield (2002: Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, NY).

Quote of the Week: Making Friends

In rural sections of the southern United States, many people believe that if one removes a fly from a spider's web he will gain a friend.

from Wonders of the Fly World, Sigmund A. Lane (1970) Dodd, Mead & Co. New York.

Quote of the Week: Beach Colors

The insect-species confined to the sea-coasts, as every collector knows, are often brassy or lurid.

from Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.

Quote of the Week

If genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple, then the study of p53 makes fools of us all.

Voudsden & Prives (2009) in the review, Blinded by the Light: the Growing Complexity of p53. Cell 137(3):413-431

Quote of the Week: Diversity in Development

If morphological diversity is all about development, and development results from genetic regulatory programs, then is the evolution of diversity directly related to the evolution of genetic regulatory programs? Simply put, yes. But to understand how diversity evolves, we must first understand the genetic regulatory mechanisms that operate in development. In other words, what is the genetic toolkit of development and how does it operate to build animals?

In, From DNA to Diversity

Carroll, Grenier and Weatherbee (2001, Blackwell Science; p.13).

Quote of the Week: Flu & Flying

What I recommend people [in airplanes] do is turn the overhead air releaser on to a low stream and position it so the flow goes in front of your face. That will increase the ventilation, at minimal, create a turbulence of air in front of your face. If a particle is coming by, that might be enough to push it out of the way.

M. Gendreau, Tufts University & Lahey Clinic

in When Flu Flies (Newsweek) April 27, 2009

Quote of the Week: Spring is for Gardening

Have you a pond in your garden? If not, why not think about making one? ... If you do this you won't have to spend much time gardening, and you will have so much more time to watch insects! ... You will not need to find insects to put in your pond; they will come by themselves.

From The Insects in Your Garden, Harold Oldroyd, 1976, Kestrel Books